Freshworks offers AI-powered capabilities through Freddy AI Insights, which are available to all Enterprise plan users.


This article contains the following topics


The power of Root Cause Analysis: Moving beyond descriptive insights

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) helps organizations move beyond surface-level insights to uncover actionable and fundamental factors that can be addressed to enhance customer and employee experiences and improve business outcomes.



Benefits of Root Cause Analysis

1. Identify the underlying factors

By pinpointing the fundamental root causes, organizations can address the real issues rather than just the symptoms.


2. Understand causality

RCA helps determine the relationships between underlying factors and issues, allowing organizations to identify the most influential factors and prioritize them for action.


3. Enable problem-solving

RCA provides the basis for developing targeted strategies, interventions, or solutions to address underlying problems or leverage positive factors driving desirable outcomes.


4. Improve decision-making

RCA enhances data-driven decision-making processes by offering a comprehensive understanding of the factors contributing to specific insights or outcomes.


5. Enable proactive measures

Enabling preventive actions, process improvements, or targeted interventions based on insights highlighted from RCA can equip organisations to take proactive measures to prevent the recurrence of similar issues.


Conducting Root Cause Analysis

Analyze the same metric through different dimensions to identify which contributes to the observed changes. This method helps pinpoint the top contributing dimensions without the need for extensive data slicing and dicing.


Example Insight: "Average Resolution Time in Bhrs increased by 32% in May 2025 as compared to the previous month".


This approach quickly reveals which dimensions have most impacted the change observed in the metric, allowing targeted actions and strategies to address specific issues or capitalize on opportunities.


1. Region: Average Resolution Time in Bhrs increased by 28% in the US region in May 2025.

2. Priority: Average Resolution Time in Bhrs increased by 21% for high-priority tickets in May 2025.

3. Channel: Average Resolution Time in Bhrs increased by 30% for email tickets in May 2025.


Enabling Root Cause Analysis

Whenever a user accesses the Freddy AI module within the product, they will see a list of all the insights that are proactively generated. These insights are user-role based; therefore, only relevant insights will be shown to each user.

  • Users just need to select any insight to get a deep dive into the leading root cause.

  • The root causes appear in an intuitive tree map representation, with each node (box) representing data.

  • There is also a summary in natural language, which simplifies the interpretation for users.

  • The “View all causes” option allows users to examine all the other contributing factors in greater detail.


Example: Root Cause Analysis

Users access the Freddy AI module and discover Proactive Insights on the left bar.



On selecting the insight, the user will see a chart, which visually depicts the insight trend.



Following the trend graph is the Root Cause Analysis, which is a summary in simple language, followed by a tree map explaining the leading cause behind the insight.



With the “View all causes” option, users can drill down and examine the other underlying causes.



Explanation of the example in detail

In the above example, the insight is about a surge in resolution time compared to last month.


The first node (box) of the tree map shows the Average Resolution Time insight, which has increased from 20 hours last month to 60 hours this month, or 40 hours or 200%.


Similarly, it also shows that the Total Ticket Count in the first node has increased to 4200 tickets, an increase of 1456 tickets compared to last month.


As we examine the linkages in the connected nodes, the surge in resolution time is related to the Cloud Security Group. Compared to last month, the average resolution time increased by 60 hours, and the total tickets increased by 1680.

On further examination of the Cloud Security Group, the increase in Average Resolution Time is seen in two categories:

  • Hardware Category

  • Network Category


Hardware Category

For the total of 1460 Tickets belonging to Cloud Security and Hardware Category, the Average Resolution Time is 120 hours, an increase of 60 hours from last month. Most of the tickets belonged to Urgent and Medium priority, where the resolution time has increased.


For the Urgent priority tickets in the Hardware Category, the First Response Time was breached for 10 Tickets, and the Average Resolution Time for those tickets is 300 hours, which is a 200-hour increase compared to last month.


Network Category

For the total of 280 Tickets belonging to Cloud Security and Network Category, the Average Resolution Time is 20 hours, an increase of 15 hours from last month.


Additionally, the First Response Time for 4 tickets is more than 40 hours, an increase of 2 tickets compared to last month. The Average Resolution Time for those tickets is 190 hours, a 100-hour increase compared to last month.


Conclusion

Root Cause Analysis is a powerful tool for moving beyond surface-level data insights. By identifying the underlying factors, understanding causality, enabling problem-solving, improving decision-making, and facilitating proactive measures, RCA empowers organizations to make meaningful improvements and drive better business outcomes. Using methods like Root Cause Analysis ensures a focused and efficient approach to uncovering the true causes behind observed data trends.


Implementing RCA in your organization will help solve current issues and pave the way for continuous improvement and long-term success.


Related links: