Wix this week introduced Ascend by Wix, a comprehensive platform of 20 products designed to help customers launch, manage and promote businesses directly from the company’s Web development platform.
Ascend helps customers promote their sites, manage customer interactions across channels, run marketing campaigns, and capture leads. The offering will be billed as an additional subscription for Wix customers.
Functionality in Ascend includes a chat-centric interface supporting real-time interactions with customers, the ability to respond automatically to queries, a wide range of intuitive SEO tools, and the ability to create unique content to engage customers via social media channels.
Impressive Results
Ascend includes new features alongside some functionality that was previously available within Wix. The company says that functionality has already had impressive results for customers, including the following:
- Customers using Chat see a 235 percent increase in site appointments and 278 more repeat visitors.
- Customers who offer site visitors access to a Members Area with profiles and purchase history see a 154 percent increase in repeat visitors.
- Customers using Automations t0 manage and automate interactions with customers see 151 percent more site traffic.
- Customers using Email Marketing see a 783 percent in site traffic.
- Customers who use Forms see a 114 percent increase in submissions.
“We have packaged these products within Ascend to be comprehensive, automated, and seamlessly engineered directly from the Wix platform,” Wix CEO and co-founder Avishai Abrahami said in a statement.
“With the launch of Ascend, we are expanding our market by offering management tools, marketing and promotion capabilities,” he added.
AI and Process Automation
Separately, Zoho last month announced the addition of artificial intelligence (AI) and process automation capabilities to its Zoho Desk customer service help desk software.
“AI can drastically raise the quality of customer service in the enterprise, especially when it draws from rich customer context,” Zoho chief evangelist Raju Vegesna said in a statement. “Zia for customer service is our first big step in that direction.”
The Zia AI sales assistant leverages an understanding of historical data to detect anomalies in common service metrics, then alert service agents and managers as needed. It can also associate topic tags to a ticket automatically and provide decision makers with an overview of the topics that customers talk about most.
Next to a ticket, agents can view the sentiment of the latest customer response, along with Zia’s predictions of the sentiment of every incoming response. Conversations with a negative sentiment can then be routed automatically to senior agents.
The company also added Blueprint for drag-and-drop service process automation and the Radar mobile app for support supervisors and managers. Zoho Desk is available starting at $15 per employee per month.