Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 18 | Page 8

NEWS HomeFixer announces collaboration with Hirsch’s Freshworks accelerates growth with market expansion in South Africa Allan Hirsch, Founder and CEO of Hirsch; Renaldo Bothma, Founder and CEO of HomeFixer; and Margaret Hirsch, COO, Hirsch S outh Africa’s recently launched home improvement app, HomeFixer, has announced a partnership with Hirsch’s, one of the country’s most well-known independent home appliances and furniture store. “We are proud to be partnering with Hirsch’s not only because of our shared values of customer care and satisfaction, but also to explore new and innovative ways of meeting customers’ needs,” said HomeFixer Founder and Managing Director, Renaldo Bothma. Craig Smith, Special Projects Manager at Hirsch’s, added that the HomeFixer app is a natural extension of the Hirsch’s digital presence. “The collaboration enables us to offer deals to qualified customers when they are actively engaged in home improvement projects. By meeting the needs of the ever increasingly-online South African consumer, Hirsch’s and HomeFixer are able to tap into the growing digital economy, which is so prevalent.” He says that exploring this approach is an exciting innovation in the appliance and home store sector, and that by actually embedding products in the app and not simply displaying product advertisements in the app, the user experience is maintained and users have the choice to engage or not. Bothma says that user experience remains critical and is something that will be a focus as the community continues to grow. “We will deliver more targeted offers to HomeFixer users, using a more customer- centric approach to build and maintain the app user’s trust,” he said. HomeFixer will offer a maximum of 12 products at a time and will cater to a wide range of budgets and tastes, reflecting the diversity of the combined audience. 8 INTELLIGENTCIO Freshworks Inc announced it is to expand in the South African market F reshworks Inc, a leading provider of cloud-based business software, has announced an aggressive growth strategy to propel the ambitious expansion of its evolving South African footprint. “Our growth plan for South Africa completely leverages the company’s product strengths, financial capabilities and technology innovation to drive industry-leading returns,” said Arihant Jain, Business Head, Middle East & Africa, Freshworks. Currently, Freshwoks serves select customers such as Berkshire Hathaway, DHL, Naspers, Hi-Sense, Web Africa and partners like Teleforge, Freshtech Africa and Stridesmart in South Africa but this base is expected to grow exponentially with the company’s new growth strategy for emerging Pmarkets such as this. As part of this growth plan, the company is inclined to make accelerated investments in hosting tailored customer events, marketing meets and roundtable conferences to build its network of brand loyalists in the region. “The South African market expansion requires keen assessment and dedicated planning,” added Jain. “Expanding in this region is an important way to magnify the size of the market we serve, and in an increasingly globally competitive marketplace, a necessary step for us. “Our aim is to build rich, meaningful engagement with enterprises of all sizes that are looking for new cutting-edge solutions to power their customer and employee experiences.” www.intelligentcio.com