Interview with Mads Fosselius, CEO & Co-Founder at Conversational Customer Engagement Platform Dixa

Dixa is a customer service software company, founded to deliver personalised and engaging ‘customer friendships’.

1. How did you come up with the idea for Dixa?

The shared vision of Dixa dates back to one of my first jobs. Working in a call-centre in Denmark, I started as an agent, became a team leader and eventually moved my way up into the IT department to create software to fill the gaps between outdated customer support systems. Together with three friends, we gained first-hand knowledge of the issues that had affected the customer support industry for decades.

For us, the obvious problem was that consumer demands and expectations were clearly changing – they didn’t want impersonal or transactional interactions when talking to one of their favourite brands – but the sector was becoming increasingly disjointed and unable to proactively adapt. As a result, brands were struggling with siloed channels, systems, and data making it impossible for customer service teams to deliver great experiences and retain customers.

So, in 2015, Dixa was started to give brands the tools to unify all their customer service channels in one single platform and equip agents with the tools they need to deliver unparalleled omnichannel support experiences. As a result, we are now empowering brands across the world to create great experiences for customers and agents in a conversational, friendly and engaging way.

2. How do you think the pandemic has helped or hindered customer facing organisations?

When the pandemic hit, all companies focussed first on employees, and then their customers. Traditional and physical channels faced significant challenges and yet, the entire world was surprised at how quickly people changed their way of acquiring things by using the internet and digital channels. Customer behaviours changed almost overnight, which meant that brands that didn’t have the right customer support infrastructure in place for the digital world had to rapidly adapt, or risk being left behind.

For example, during the week when the first UK lockdown was announced, allplants experienced a 400% acquisition rate. It quickly realised that its existing ticket-based platform was overworked and turned to Dixa to allow it to keep both customers and staff happy.

It also impacted the customer experience sector more broadly. We more than doubled our revenue in 2020 and we did this by making a bold move and investing in three areas:

1.   Our product – which readied us for the explosion of customers
2.   Customer success – by recruiting strong teams and leaders
3.   A campaign to help struggling brands – by postponing payments to brands in struggling sectors we were able to help companies get into a new way of working with customer friendship at their core

Rather than waiting it out and saying goodbye to brands, we were proactive and enabled brands to leverage the opportunities provided by changes in consumer behaviour.

3. What’s next for Dixa? 

We have spent years perfecting our unique algorithms and building a platform with a conversational CX core, enabling intelligent and efficient customer interactions at large scale. While this has significantly boosted customer and agent satisfaction, customer retention and productivity for our exciting portfolio of customers, we aren’t stopping there.

For us, the next step is investing in the cognitive experience. Organisations and brands need a complete platform leveraging data, AI and machine learning, delivering contextual knowledge to customers, support agents and internal teams when they need it. This is why we recently acquired Elevio, an intelligent knowledge management platform that automatically delivers relevant user guides and information to customers, support agents, and internal teams based on message content. Parachuting this to the heart of our platform will free up time for support agents to focus on building real relationships with customers and helping them with what really counts.

As rebuilding consumer confidence and trust becomes more important this year, I really cannot think of a better time to invest in omnichannel customer support and conversational CX.