As we approach the last days of a year that has felt endless, we’re taking a few moments to look back at these historic––for better or worse––12 months and reflect upon how it’s gone. Our young company faced the most challenging year since our founding, but we came through it stronger than ever, experiencing shining moments of validation and victory amongst the hardships – 2020 was truly a year of extremes.
We learned a lot this year, and despite the distance between us––with remote work becoming the norm––as an organization, we’re closer than ever. After all, we’ve been through a lot together!
Amidst the intensity of this year, we managed to achieve some pretty exciting things.
Here are a few highlights from the year before we dive in. In 2020, we:
- launched a ton of really cool product features
- more than doubled our revenue
- hired 100 new Dixaterians
- started working with lots of super cool brands
- rebranded and launched a new website
Alright, let’s get into it.
January
We kicked off the year with the launch of our ‘Death of Tickets’ campaign. It turns out that this cheeky moniker was well-earned, given that many brands are starting to find that ticketing systems offer customers an outdated and subpar experience.
Today, customers value personal, real relationships with the brands they support and don’t like being reduced to just a number. Customer experience has moved on from this old-school approach, and Dixa’s conversational approach seems to have hit just the right note for customer-loving brands.
February
February was a highpoint for the company, with Dixa securing 36M USD in Series B funding! Headed up by Notion Capital, with participation from our existing investors, Project A Ventures and SEED Capital, this was a major milestone. With this new injection of capital (having secured our $14M USD Series A just a year before) we were gearing up for hypergrowth and expansion.
We planned to use the new capital to accelerate product development, as well as double down on our go-to-market strategy in Europe and the U.S.
March
The opposite of “in like a lion, out like a lamb” proved true here, with the month beginning normally enough. With our Series B only recently secured, the year ahead felt full of possibility, and we even held one of our beloved Dixa Connect events (in the early days of the month).
However, as Denmark went into lockdown mid-month, we had to transition to working remotely almost overnight. We knew that working from home, as appealing as it might sound, would come with its own unique set of challenges, mental health being a key one. We launched our remote work playbook to combat these challenges and help our colleagues navigate this new way of working.
April
As the pandemic became a global reality, Dixa was not immune, and we had to do a complete commercial pivot, putting the brakes on hypergrowth.
This wasn’t easy, and we had to make some very hard decisions, but going through this made us smarter, leaner, and faster, simply because we had to be.
Along with our commercial pivot, our People & Culture team undertook our first-ever fully-virtual onboarding. Welcoming new hires is a big deal at Dixa and we like to do it in style, so our P&C team had to get a little creative… Virtual team lunches were even a thing!
We ended the month with a virtual celebration of Dixa’s 5th birthday! From a kitchen table in Copenhagen to four European offices and a newly-minted Series B. Not really the in-person shindig we had planned for, but still an exciting day!
May
The death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer incited protests across the United States (and the world) against police brutality and anti-Black violence. As the Black Lives Matter movement grew in strength, it sparked a global reckoning and one that we at Dixa took seriously.
Our People & Culture team has since been working hard to facilitate internal discussions, promote anti-racism resources as well as make concrete changes within the organization. We know that confronting and challenging biases is ongoing work and not something that can happen overnight but as an organization, we are committed to doing this work.
June
In Denmark, an early lockdown ensured an easier summer than those in other parts of the world experienced. This meant that we could fully reopen our Copenhagen HQ in June. We were thrilled to be back in the office with our colleagues and took full advantage of all the great face-to-face conversations and collaboration we had missed over the preceding months (not to mention the free coffee!).
However, we knew that not everyone was lucky enough to be able to do this, and recognized the challenges many customer service teams might be encountering while working from home.
To help with this, we wrote an article on staying resilient while providing customers with the support they needed and being kind to yourself as well.
July
Dixa was founded with the mission of facilitating friendships between brands and their customers, so as you can imagine, July 30th (International Friendship Day) is a pretty big deal around here.
During “normal” years, we have the pleasure of visiting and celebrating with some of our local customers, but this year, for safety reasons, we decided to turn the spotlight in-house and ask some of our colleagues about friendships in their own lives. Take a look at the video we made here!
August
August is Pride Month in Copenhagen, and we celebrated by shining a spotlight on boundary-breaking LGBTQ+ tech innovators.
Check out our profiles on:
We hoped that by sharing success stories of amazing individuals each week in August, we could help honor milestone achievements within the LGBTQ+ community.
September
We started off the month strong, winning ‘Hottest Scale-up in Denmark’ as part of The Next Web and Adyen’s Tech 5 competition! It was a huge honor to receive this award and one that we don’t take for granted.
We began to ramp up again, welcoming more than 20 new employees in September alone. We also had the pleasure of doing in-person onboarding once more, which we’ll never take for granted again!
Finally, we collaborated with our customer, Organic Basics, for an exciting presentation at CX Day, which let attendees in on the secret to delivering top-notch digital customer experiences and getting one step closer to customer love.
October
Call us a 90’s rom-com because we got a makeover! Our Marketing team got to unveil a very exciting project in October – Dixa’s rebranding and new website! Months of hard work culminated in an updated brand that jives with our spirit of conversation and connection, and a website that clearly reflects our mission of facilitating conversational customer support.
October was also a month of award nominations!
We were shortlisted at The International CX Awards in three categories, and nominated for three Nordic Startup Awards, including Founder of the Year for our fearless leader, Mads Fosselius. We later became a finalist in the ‘Startup of the Year’ category. Finally, we were shortlisted for five Women in Tech Employer Awards!
We were extremely honored and humbled to be named finalists in so many prestigious awards.
November
November is always a busy month for us, with our Product & Engineering teams gearing up for the rush that Black Friday & Cyber Monday bring. We facilitated a record number of conversations this year and look forward to an even busier BFCM next year!
We also created this 12-point strategic checklist to help our ecommerce customers prepare for the rush.
December
As we gear up for our Series C funding in 2021, we’re looking at an exciting and busy year ahead!
We’ll keep growing our awesome team (check out our open positions here) as well as launching new product features and updates.
If you want a sneak peek of 2021 customer service trends, check out this article.
We’re looking forward to closing the door on 2020 and starting a new chapter next year. We’ll see you there!