Podia

The Situation

Founded in 2014, Podia is an online platform that allows users to build websites, manage email marketing, sell courses and digital products, and host communities with a clean, professional look that’s easy to build from one platform. The company was created to empower creative entrepreneurs to make a living doing what they love so users can spend their time creating, not figuring out yet another piece of tech. 

With 32 people located around the world, Podia has successfully grown to serve more than 150,000 website owners with a service team of 10 agents. In 2022 they launched a “freemium” model which they anticipated would ramp up their support volume. Their system at the time, Intercom, had a number of limits they felt might hold them back from supporting their future business growth. Podia’s service team were looking for a way to remain a lean team and use smart technology (like their own) that would allow them to leverage deflection, improve routing, and make sure customers were prioritized correctly.  

The ultimate goal for the service team is to focus on supporting the creators and for the creators to get the answers they need as soon as possible so they can continue doing what they love.

The Challenge

Before Dixa, the Podia team was using Intercom as their customer service system. As the company grew, the service team started to notice some limitations with Intercom that required them to look for a new solution.  A few of these limitations included a pricing structure that would grow exponentially as they scaled, challenges differentiating between email and chat channels, and analytics that were hard to take action on for support teams. Worst of all, this all caused customer frustration as it was difficult to set proper expectations on response times.

Podia’s chat widget is embedded everywhere on the Marketing website, Help Center, and app, so all of their support requests were essentially funneled through the chatbot. While volumes were low they could simulate a ‘live’ chat experience for everyone, but as volume grew it was getting tougher and customers were often left waiting. This was not an ideal set up. 
Another major problem was Intercom’s pricing model. Podia were being charged per conversation so as the number of customer service conversations grew, their costs were rising. And lastly, when their new VP of Creator Support, Katherine Pan joined, she realized the service team’s KPIs were unrealistic and needed to be adjusted. Coming from the sales and marketing industry, and not being purpose-built for customer service teams, Intercom wasn’t flexible enough to support the changes Katherine wanted to make. Intercom’s reporting just couldn’t provide the information and insights she needed to know how the team was performing.

The Solution

Podia selected Dixa as its Conversational Customer Service Platform in August 2022. They felt the modern, conversational platform, built for customer service teams, would help them overcome the challenges they’d face with the increase in volume they were forecasting. Dixa provided the right combination of customer service automation to support them as they scaled while allowing them to provide the human touch that would give their customers the personalized service their brand promised.

Creating seamless customer experiences

Podia’s creators have the convenience of reaching out on any channel, including self service channels that allow customers to find the answers they are looking for 24/7. Because all channels are built natively into Dixa’s platform, there are no system integrations that can cause conversations to be dropped or lost so if a conversation does need to go to an agent, the agent has all the conversational history at a glance. Customers receive a convenient, consistent experience that’s purpose-built for conversations whether they get resolved by the chatbot or with a seamless handover to an agent. And since all the customer touch points didn’t go through the Intercom chatbot, as was the case before Dixa, it was easier to report on each channel and get clarity where things were working or needed to be improved.

An intuitive platform agents love to use

With Dixa, once a conversation request reaches an agent, they have the benefit of working in a single screen interface so they don’t waste time hunting for information across systems, screens or tabs. Podia’s agents can focus on finding the best answer for the customer, not fighting their systems. Giving agents all the information they need at their fingertips really empowers them to provide the personalized and premium customer experience Podia wants to deliver, all while increasing agent efficiency. 

Dixa helps Podia by eliminating manual, repetitive tasks, with features like auto-tagging, removing micro-decisions from agent workflows, proactively displaying contextual and relevant information, and supporting remote workers on the team. Conversations are now prioritized based on a customer’s plan, and they’re able to offer live chat support and email support for paid members, and email support only for free members. Dixa’s platform allows the Podia team to meet their goal of staying lean and highly productive as they continue to grow. 

A contextual knowledge base

One of the main pains Podia felt before Dixa was the time it took to maintain their knowledge base. With Dixa, they are now able to quickly upskill agents and respond to customers using dynamic knowledge to help them continuously improve customer satisfaction. It’s important for the team to have consistent internal and external knowledge and help increase self-service rates. Agents also need a solid  knowledge base to rely on when servicing customers and the team has access to Dixa’s knowledge management experts.

Reporting built for customer service teams

With Dixa, Katherine was finally able to set up the team’s KPIs to support the business’ growth plans. Dixa Discover, Dixa’s analytics reporting feature makes it easy for her to get a clear overview of team and agent performance across all channels. She also now has  a clearer sense of team performance across the whole conversation, not just the first response. Dixa’s reporting measures metrics that support teams need to monitor, not marketing teams or sales teams, as was the case with Intercom. With Dixa it’s easy to toggle between high-level trends and individual data points. If something feels off, it’s easy to find the outlier, dive into the conversation, and connect the dots.

Quick time to value with Customer Friendship^TM

Having the right technology available with Dixa’s platform helped Podia address the challenges they were facing with Intercom, but another real benefit is Dixa’s Customer Friendship^TM. 

Dixa’s flexible and modular platform makes it fast and simple to set up, as well as easy to customize and manage. Set up and customize service flows are done with drag and drop functionality to create business-led agility. For Podia that meant that they were up and running with Dixa in record time with a fast and simple implementation process. They also had access to Dixa specialists to support optimization using proven best practices.

Dixa offers ongoing support through partnership and the sharing of modern customer service best practices. This support helps Podia create a better customer and agent experience as Podia’s business evolves. Best of all, as Podia’s customer base of both freemium and paid creators grows, the cost of Dixa will stay predictable.

What’s Next?

Katherine is looking forward to exploring the benefits of AI and ChatGPT in the coming months. She’ll be trying out Dixa’s ChatGPT-powered chatbot, Mim, as well as other features that use AI and automation. These features allow customers to help themselves and empower the team with tools to continue to stay efficient. AI won’t fully replace the human aspect for their work, but assist them in doing their jobs. For example, summarizing a long conversation, or generating a macro on the fly from a help article.

Expand Use of Quality Assurance and Team Performance

tink will be taking a deeper look at Dixa’s Quality Assurance feature to help them understand the holistic view of their customer service operations performance. They’ll be able to customize Dixa’s QA across all communication channels for all teams. Centralized results give managers and agents quick and easy access to insights for greater transparency and actionable information for true improvements. Empower agents with transparent feedback.