The Challenges of B2B Customer Support | With Naomi Rozenfeld Executive Vice President at WixAnswers

You know, speaking about, you know, challenges in the market right now. So obviously, you know, 2020 has been a lot of challenges with COVID-19, you know, the pandemic, lockdowns, brought a lot of challenges to many, you know, to people in the customer support space. You guys have some big clients. You have like, you know, Fiverr, Getty Images, Viber, and others. What kind of, you know, challenges are you seeing from B2B, specifically customer support teams facing, and what are these companies doing to face those challenges and trying to solve them? Are you seeing any trends there?

There's 2 repeating themes that are coming up. The first one is a bigger focus on knowledge. So if you would have talked to me at the beginning of the year, around January time, I would have told you that Talking to companies about making change when it comes to self-service within an organization is something that many companies want to do, but they don't really know how to tackle. And with COVID hitting, what we've seen is that a lot of companies are scrambling right now to rethink or to improve or to put a lot more resources when it comes to self-service, because communication with users or making sure that you're enabling your users to find what they need has become more critical than ever. So that's something that we were pushing really, really hard with organizations, trying to help them to understand how to do this. And COVID has really accelerated that process of putting pressure on companies to really optimize their self-service or to even get something in place to start answering and helping their users who want to self-service themselves. And a derivative of that would be more like seamless communication with users. And what I mean by that is During COVID we've seen this as well in like retail and a lot of businesses that do have an influx of customer interactions or customer queries, that customers have a tendency to hit on multiple channels. That can be a little bit more true for B2C, but it's also quite true for B2B. So when something's going wrong and it's also harder to reach certain companies or businesses, you're seeing a little bit more of an increase of customers starting to hit you up on email, but then they're also calling, they're requesting callback requests, they're filling out your forms, and they're trying to get your attention in many different ways. And the challenge there for many businesses is how do they consolidate all of that and get one clear funnel and experience for their end users, but also from the agents who are handling it on the other side. And we've started to see a lot more of an increase in companies trying to solve that problem specifically, of a much more seamless transition between multiple channels for customers. Seems to be— it's been a behavior that's been there all along, but it seems to be a little bit more right now apparent. given just, you know, the circumstances in COVID and a lot of how our world has changed recently.

Yeah, fair enough. So speaking about those different kinds of communication channels, how does Wix Answers deploy, you know, the unified support strategy? So across all those touchpoints, what are the channels you guys offer and how are they organized for teams under the same platform?

Yeah, so we didn't really invent the wheel with anything when it comes to channels, right? I mean, today it's pretty standard. You can allow your customers to reach out to you on, On chat, on social, phone, callback, you know, inbound emails, forms, whatever. What we do very, very differently, and I think this goes back to the story and how we had built the tool internally for us, is we basically built this technology from the ground up with all of the channels plugged in. And in a very seamless way, switching between each other. So an example of that would be, let's say you and I started a chat and you need some help. I can quickly turn that chat into a phone call, so I can call you or you can request a callback. I can easily transition to email where I might send you a help guide or some sort of troubleshooting and then transition back into chat. So you would never have any kind of broken experience. We wouldn't need you to open a new tab. The user wouldn't have to click somewhere else or to like dig around too much. And that is really like a byproduct of how the platform was designed. With other platforms that are out there today, if you look at a lot of how their channels are structured, whether it was acquisitions that they have done, right, to acquire different technologies such as chat or bots or calls— actually, most of the providers out there today don't even have built-in contact centers. So for example, if you're going to use Salesforce, you're going to need to go to a third-party vendor as well in order to get that calls plugged in and then integrated with Salesforce. So with Wix Answers, everything is just there. So that seamless transition between channels is apparent to an agent from quite simply just one timeline in a transition of basically any channel that the user is on will all come to one single timeline, one conversation. And from the end user experience is basically just one single touchpoint that can really change its face and the way you interact with it in many different ways. So it can be in product, on mobile, Basically chat callback requests, knowledge articles that have escalations to chat or to calls, and it's just basically one single and very seamless touchpoint for the user regardless of where they are in your funnel.

Got it. So I want to touch base because you mentioned, you know, Salesforce is one, and then a couple— I know, speaking about competition, there's a few other, I guess, leaders in the SaaS space, right? You got Zendesk, you have Freshdesk, you have Zoho Desk. How else does Wix Answers differentiate from Others, and who are your ideal teams that should consider using your platform? Who are people that, you know, what are the size of the teams you're typically working with?

I'll answer the latter part first, which is just the teams of sizes, the company sizes that we go after. Initially, when we had taken this product to market, we thought that because we had, you know, this is a company that was still created under the larger Wix umbrella. So, you know, for listeners listening in and they know a thing or two about Wix, we're very well known for the DIY, the ease of use, and the aesthetics, and that just became a very inherent part of the DNA of how Wix Answers as a platform was built. We initially thought that this would be like an SMB tool, you know, because we said, hey, it's much easier to get onboarded. Support is already so complex as it is, we're just making it more simple. And we quickly realized that we actually also had a very strong affinity for very large-scale organizations. 'Cause when you think about it, Wix Answers today, we're supporting 200 million Wix users. It can do a lot. We have 2,000 customer care reps at Wix working 365, 7 days a week, in over 17 languages. So it's a pretty massive platform in terms of what it can do and how much it can power. And we started to find that a lot of companies that were much larger in scale, we were also drawing their attention in terms of the capabilities and just the overall robustness of what this platform can do. So today we look at companies that are about 1,000 employees and above. And we're also looking as well at startups and starting with that more bottom, the groundswell of businesses that are growing very fast. But for the most part, we're looking right now at about 1,000+ and very SaaS-centric businesses. To answer your first question about, you know, Freshdesk, Zoho Desk, Zendesk, and I definitely do think it is a 2-horse race. with Salesforce Service Cloud and Zendesk leading the way, they really, you know, even Zendesk, they really made support a thing. It was a thing that you wanted to own and you wanted to talk about, and it had a lot of branding around, hey, like, customer experiences matter. It goes back to initially what I said, where we are really, really different is we remove a lot of complexity from everyday support tasks that need to be had and make it much easier for companies to move. So if you think about it, if you need to move 1% and you're a very large organization, you need to change your automation, you need to change your flows. People tend to forget as well that the support departments within any organization are some of the fastest adapting teams within a company, right? So think about, you put out a promotion, you pivot something, you add a new product, you make changes in a product, the team within the organization that has to react to that the fastest is your support teams. And that means they need to move, they need to make changes, they need to adapt, they need to update, they need to be most informed in front of the customer. And what we found is that companies are really crippled there to move quickly. There was a very strong dependency on R&D and development. There was a really slower pace of how quickly they can make changes and then launch them. Wix Answers, because we were built in-house at Wix, and like I said, all of the channels are built in and everything is just there in one cohesive way, it's much easier to move. And the biggest advantage as well as being that, having that UX and UI that was really nurtured as part of the DNA of Wix has only made it easier to create easier workflows and automation without huge dependency on R&D and development. So that's a really big edge that we have when we come to companies and we say to them, look, you need to change your automation. You want better reporting, you want more real-time reporting. We're also the first in the industry to do like real, real-time reporting in a way that nobody else can. And you can do that in under a week. But with Zendesk or Salesforce, it's going to take you like a month, right? Or 2 months. That's a massive advantage to any company that wants to move that needle. And you move that 1% and that can usually translate into millions of dollars, right? So I would say that that's where our biggest differentiators lie.

Yeah, that's super important, especially when, yeah, they're at the front of the line, right? They're talking to people, they need those changes instantly. And that's interesting you say about the, specifically about, you know, using the ideal teams. Like you guys built internally with a, it was probably been overkill if you guys targeted SMBs, right? You built it for a team of 2,000 and then you go out to market. Yeah, that you probably overbuilt it for them, right? Over-engineered it.