Website-building platform Wix launches Wix Answers. This is a customer support product and new company called Wix Answers.
Joe Pollaro, the general manager of Wix’s U.S. business, said that while the company has “been expanding into much larger types of users, enterprise-class users,” Wix Answers wasn’t part of that grand strategy. Instead, it’s a product that the company built to meet its own support needs, which it subsequently productized and spun out into a separate entity.
“I don’t think there are many companies out there that have gone out there and just decided to build something so critical as customer communications,” Pollaro told me. “That’s part of our DNA: If we don’t feel like we find something out there that fits our needs, we just decide to build it ourselves.”
What was missing from those existing products? Pollaro said Wix “needed something to give us the full picture of customer communication — not just opening tickets and solving problems and moving on.”
Carl Lane, the product solutions expert for Wix Answers, made similar points when he demonstrated the product. For example, he pointed to the platform’s “360 degree of the user,” with things like the company they work for, whether they’re “a VIP user” and showing all the customer service conversations they’ve had across channels, whether that’s via phone call, chat, website ticket or email.
Lane also said that the platform uses AI to help customer support agents respond more quickly, and to recommend ways to make the team more effective (like making customer support articles more accessible).
And with the Wix Answers dashboard, “it doesn’t matter what channel [the customer] used, there’s a consistent experience for our agents.”
That can help with the workflow, for example by flagging when there’s an alarming number of people waiting to have their calls answered (so maybe it’s time to pull some people out of meetings).
Image Credits: Wix
“You get complete visibility over your workforce any time,” Lane said. Similarly, on the analytics side, he said, “Analytics are vital to customer support organizations. When customers have one product for chat and one product for email, it’s really hard at the end of the day to see how well did everyone do.”
With Wix Answers, Lane showed me that how a manager could bring up a customer service team member’s record to see the total number of tickets they’d responded to and many customer satisfaction surveys were filled out afterwards.
Clients already using the Answers product include Getty Images, MyHeritage, Guesty, Viber, Fiverr and Yotpo.
“Wix Answers is applicable to a business of any size,” Lane added. “We see successful customers using Answers who are five- or 10-member teams, up to the Wix level. I think that Answers is a platform that can grow with you.”
This post originally appeared on Techcrunch.
