Jasco, Freshworks partner to consolidate customer-management systems

The shift from traditional channels such as phone calls and walk-ins to social media, messaging platforms and web-based support has created new challenges for organisations whose systems operate separately.

Patrick Muthui, Chairman of Jasco Communications, said fragmented systems can make it difficult for customer service teams to establish a complete picture of an interaction.

“Customer service agents frequently operate on isolated platforms, meaning a tweet, an email, and a phone call from the same individual look like three different customers,” he said.

The result, he said, is that employees may spend time moving between platforms to reconstruct customer histories, while customers are sometimes required to repeat information when their cases are transferred.

Jasco Communications has partnered with Freshworks to provide a customer service system that brings interactions from multiple channels into one platform. The system can consolidate communication histories from channels including SMS, email and social media.

The companies say the approach is particularly relevant to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which have traditionally faced higher costs and longer implementation periods when adopting large enterprise customer-management systems.

Bonface Kiogora, Head of Business Development at Jasco Communications, said reducing implementation barriers was one of the areas the partnership was seeking to address.

“A major focus of the Jasco and Freshworks partnership is addressing the heavy implementation barriers that historically kept advanced customer management out of reach for smaller firms,” he said.

The platform also incorporates artificial intelligence and automated workflows to help organisations identify and prioritise incoming customer requests.

Precious Viata, Lead Engineer at Jasco Communications, said the technology can help organisations move from analysing customer information to acting on it in real time.

The system can flag messages based on sentiment and urgency and route selected queries to relevant teams. It can also identify recurring issues and prompt agents with approved responses, according to the company.

Businesses using the technology cited its role in consolidating customer interactions and supporting operations as they expand.

Purity Mwema, Business and Operations Manager at M-KOPA, said the company has used Freshworks for eight years for internal ticketing, communication and customer interactions.

“With Jasco and Freshworks' support, we have been able to smoothly integrate several systems based on how our business grows,” Mwema said. She added that M-KOPA now serves 10 million customers across several markets.

Ruth Atambo, Member Experience Manager at Qona Sacco, said the organisation previously handled member interactions across separate email and telephone channels, making it difficult to track conversations and produce reports.

“Since onboarding, there is absolute accountability because what is measured is managed well. We have centralized our communications, eliminated departmental silos, and vastly improved our custom reporting,” Atambo said.

The discussion comes as organisations increasingly look at how customer-service systems can keep pace with digital adoption while maintaining a record of interactions across different channels.