One of the biggest ‘mega-trends’ of the 21st century has been the explosion in communication channels. There’s now a channel for everything; whether we want to organise a lunch with a group of friends, collaborate at work or announce something to the world. It’s multi-media, it’s fast and audiences can be huge. It is a basic human instinct to want to communicate and we can now do it like never before.

A ton of value and a long list of large companies have been created off the back of this trend, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Intercom, Slack, Skype, WhatsApp, WeChat and Zoom.

The challenge for brands

Now there are clearly pros and cons to having this amazing range of communication tools at our fingertips and I don’t want to get into that debate. But what I do ask myself is, “what must it be like for a brand to have all these communications channels between themselves and their customers?”

As customers we are empowered like never before. We expect an instant response no matter what the channel. We can compare products and pricing in seconds. Never have we had so much choice or has it been so easy to switch our brand allegiance. And we can broadcast our displeasure to millions of people at a time.

This is why I’m so excited to announce my latest investment. Dixa is building a customer support platform for the 21st century. It is truly channel agnostic, has a unified data model and leverages AI to deliver real-time routing and intelligence.

Evolution and fragmentation

Customer support is one of the largest software categories but at the same time it is very fragmented. The solutions out there reflect our changing means of communication. It used to be all about voice and performed by people in real-time. Then the emergence of email led to solutions that were based on tickets and a time lag before a response could be provided. Over the last decade we have seen the emergence of the multi-channel environment with solutions for SMS, chat, a range of messaging apps and of course social media.

The vendors in the market have all started by specialising in a certain channel. Over time they have then bolted on additional functionality into their products to keep up with the changing forms of communication and to open up a larger market. The problem with this is that it is always done retrospectively and results in a highly fragmented and frustrating experience for both customers and agents.

At Notion we know the market well through our investment in NewVoiceMedia who were acquired by Vonage in 2018 for $350m. NewVoiceMedia built a fantastic business and it turned out to be a great investment for Notion. But, as the name would suggest, we saw how challenging it was for a business built around voice to meet the demands of an ever-increasing number of communication channels.

The right solution at the right time

I’m convinced that the Dixa is building the customer support platform of the future. As channels come and go they will be able to respond seamlessly. And as their ever-expanding unified data model grows, they will leverage AI to bring intelligence to every interaction, matching requests with the right agent (or chatbot) supported with context and recommendations.

The company is growing very fast and has an impressive list of brands as customers. Their customers talk about Dixa freeing them from their ‘Frankenstein's monster’ of cobbled together products with the ‘one screen wonder’ of the Dixa solution. Over time more and more brands will come to the same realisation - that they need to change if they are to build strong and lasting relationships with their customers.

And, as I spent more time with the company’s CEO, Mads Fosellius, his 3 co-founders and the rest of the senior team, I became more and more confident that they have the right mix of talent, experience and ambition to deliver on the tremendous opportunity they have in front of them.

This is why I believe Dixa is powering the perfect customer conversation and will have a major impact on the market. I couldn’t be more excited to be investing in the business.

Why Notion? A note from the Founders...

Dixa was born out of the personal and professional frustrations we experienced being consumers ourselves engaging with brands and having worked within the customer service tech space for many years. The customer service software space has never lacked competition, but the existing solutions still created subpar agent and customer experiences and we knew there had to be a better way. Deciding to take on and industry with giants that have been around for decades is exciting and extremely challenging at the same time.

When meeting potential VCs, it’s common to have to explain your product at a higher level given the fact that your audience is probably not an expert in your space. With Notion, they understood our product and purpose immediately. It felt great to get to speak on a deeper level about Dixa and the journey we are on to an audience that just “got it" in addition to having significant and dedicated experience within SaaS and customer engagement software.There are many benefits we see to partnering with Notion but the main reasons we chose them are:

1. Notion is the ‘go-to’ B2B SaaS investor in Europe
2. Notion is founded by experienced SaaS entrepreneurs that personally know the "bumpy ride" of growing a company from start-up to unicorn
3. Notion also happens to have unique domain knowledge in the customer service software space in particular

With their strong SaaS track record with Tradeshift, Mews, NewVoiceMedia, Paddle, Unbabel, and others, we feel that we’ve found the perfect partner. We could not be more thrilled to have a partner like Notion to accompany us on this next crucial phase of our growth.