The customer voice – Panasonic Consumer Electronics and RingCentral execs talk about their AI journeys with Freshworks

Here at diginomica we never tire of saying to vendors that the single best proof point of their technologies is their customers and what they are doing with it. Slick Powerpoint slides and smooth demos – if the god of demos is good to you that day – are all fine and dandy and an important part of the go-to-market (GTM) mix, but it’s the stories from the frontline that close the credibility deal.

So it was good to see that Freshworks Investor Day meeting this week took the same view and that alongside an exhaustive overview of the company’s various offerings and strategic direction sat two customers providing their testimony about their own use of the company’s tech.

Michelle Esgar is Director of Marketing & Experience at Panasonic Consumer Electronics, a name familiar to us all, but one whose role in North America has changed. Esgar explains:

For a very, very long time, Panasonic Consumer Electronics was a sales company in the United States, and so our job was essentially to move boxes from Japan into the retailer. Obviously, the environment has changed dramatically and so now we are learning how to become a brand, how to build our own relationships with customers, and how to customize that experience for each individual category of business that we have.

Esgar describes the fact that she runs both Marketing and post-purchase Experience as “very telling”. It reflects a changed set of expectations and demands, she suggests;

What used to have been, let’s say, an SLA for the support side would have been time to resolution. Now what we’re really looking at is building loyalty with those customers. It’s return visits to the website. It’s engagement in our e-mails.

Freshworks was selected at Panasonic to meet some specific challenges, she recalls:

We have what I thought was a very simple problem in terms of our data, which was just a multi-multi relationship. So in other words, we have thousands of SKU (stock-keeping units), and each one relates to a lot of different questions, and then you have thousands of questions, and each one relates to multiple SKUs. There was not a solution provider out there that could help me do that in a simple way. And Fresh could, to some extent, do it natively but more importantly, had a really, really flexible API so that I could build out into what we needed to do with our data in an easy way.

That customization aspect was very important, she adds:

[Freshworks] came for a couple of days with our team, really mapped out our vision, customized that for us. Where we landed on our vision was actually like a Japanese concept of Customer Experience that resonated so well with the rest of my exec team.

Efficiency

Vineet Sachdev is Head of IT at RingCentral, an American provider of cloud-based communication and collaboration products and services. His firm also had some specific challenges to address when engaging Freshworks:

We empower businesses to collaborate via a phone conversation, video meetings, SMS and extract conversational intelligence via AI. One of the main challenges started in the world of pandemic, when overnight we had to transform the company and move thousands of employees to remote locations. And the key to success or how I’m measured against that is general employee experience and can I significantly decrease the manual workloads that my IT organization had to do?

So we started this journey in 2019, just around the pandemic time. We had a legacy system. It was quite clunky and had a massive amount of customization. We were looking for a vendor that truly delivers a product, not a platform and [then] asks me to develop the product. I think that was the big decision factor for us – that I can take something and deploy at mass scale in the matter of weeks and start seeing the results.

In a complex world of multiple tech systems, RingCentral has a view on how it wants its vendor relationships to operate. Sachdev explains:

When you are running an IT organization of a $2.5 billion company, you have a lot of vendors in your portfolio. We do a lot of buys-and-build type of strategy. You always value a vendor who is like-minded, and they are thinking about the endgame as you are. So having that alignment, having that flexibility where I can pick up the phone, I can reach out to the organization and where I’m not being just being sold the next thing, that’s priceless.

RingCentral began its use of Freshworks tech on the IT side, recalls Sachdev, but it soon expanded into other areas:

The journey that started just as an ITSM (IT Service Management) for the IT organization, we have expanded that to the entire company, whether it is Procurement or HR or Sales Operations. We have not only expanded the footprint, but we have also expanded how we have integrated this platform across all of enterprise applications. So it has evolved into a truly enterprise orchestration platform for me.

AI, of course

As it’s 2025, Sachdev makes a statement that will be music to the ears of Freshworks strategists when he declares:

My mission is to fundamentally transform IT with the power of AI.

Earlier in the day, Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside went into some detail about Freshworks’s track record in and direction for its AI product investment, when he said:

Across all of our AI products, we’re seeing strong adoption. We’ve doubled the number of paying customers in the last year, and usage is also strong. We’re seeing about 40 million monthly ticket assists by Copilot. Millions of AI agent conversations are being handled since we GA-ed that product just in February. And the most important metric is the impact that those products have on our customers’ businesses. 

Panasonic and RingCentral are among those businesses. For her part, Esgar says:

We started integrating AI chatbots very early with Fresh, and they’re already handling 80% of our chat interactions. So immediately, that’s a big win. And it’s not even about the efficiency there. It’s really about the time that it’s opening for my team and my resources to then go that extra mile and stop using support in a defensive way and start using support more on offense as an opportunity to connect with customers.

I don’t know how up to date everybody is on what Panasonic has been up to lately, but we’re not just kind of the TV company anymore. That’s the reality. Each line of business that we have, we have very, very unique kind of a customer. So for example, Lumix, which is our high-end camera line, that has a customer that by no means whatsoever wants to call us, They want to go on a forum, and they want to have a two-way conversation with other users. They kind of don’t want to talk to us at all.

On the other hand – and brace yourselves here for a “shocking number”, as Esgar puts it – others have very different needs:

We still sell $35 million worth of landline phones every year, cordless landline phones. That customer is an aging demographic. Ninety percent of what they call us about is already in the manual, but to be fair, the manual is in size four font, and I can barely read it, so they certainly can’t. A lot of times they just want to talk to somebody.

These differing demographics lead to some questions around what’s wanted of and needed from AI, she suggests:

How do we just sort of get the scale down to a place where we can handle it now it’s getting really exciting? There’re unlimited possibilities to how I’m going to be able to uniquely serve each of these customers and really give them like an incredible, delightful experience. We know that if a customer buys a product from us and everything goes well and they’re happy with the product, they’re about 78% likely to recommend us to a friend. If a customer has a product, that product breaks and they call us and they have a phenomenal experience with us, they’re actually 82% likely to recommend us. So that support experience, it’s probably the number one opportunity for us to engage with customers in a one-on-one way and really build something loyal. That’s where AI gets exciting.

RingCentral has been on its own AI journey, says Sachdev:

In the last 12 to 18 months, we have come a long way, from experimentation to ‘This is the only way forward’. And I’m not viewing AI as, ‘Hey, how I can extract 20% more efficiency or productivity for my employees?’.  AI has given me an opportunity to fundamentally re-think every business process we have, whether it touches GTM, Customer Support, innovation or Finance. And that opportunity has never existed. So I’m living, breathing, eating AI, day in and day out, and re-imagining every aspect of employee experience.

The firm has already deployed Freshworks Freddy AI agent, he says, and has seen “a significant improvement” in the agent productivity. But that is just the beginning, he says, talking of growing from being from a reactive IT organization to truly pro-active as well as a business partner to the business:

IT classically has been in a ticket-taking mode. You tell me what you want me to deliver, and I’ll deliver for you. This is the first time I have an opportunity where I can be pro-active and be a business partner.,,,I want to double down on agentic AI and move away from this concept that, ‘Hey, I’m giving you an AI agent that is going to make your life 20% better’. It is not about how I can increase the efficiency and productivity of an agent.

In terms of future goals for AI, he concludes:

I want the AI to become truly autonomous, where we start detecting pro-actively where the problem is and not wait for somebody to report it to me. So, if I have forward-looking vision, I will say, let’s double down on Agentic AI. And Agentic AI just isn’t generative AI, it is where agents are truly taking actions pro-actively.

For her part, Esgar ponders:

What does Panasonic need to be doing and how can we support each other and create new solutions and new pathways and new ways of serving that [are]  not on anyone’s radar right now? There’s little obvious things. We know that AI needs to read our manuals for us, so we don’t need to manually write content. We know we’re going to want an avatar that can interact with you realistically and help you with your camera. But I have no idea what’s going to be after that.