Wix: Keeping Web Design and Call Support Simple with Twilio

Wix: Keeping Web Design and Call Support Simple with Twilio

Avishai Abraham, Nadav Abrahami and Giora Kaplan created Wix to meet a global need for a drag-and-drop approach to creating beautiful, professional-looking websites—no technical or coding skills required.

Following its release in 2008, Wix began growing at an exponential rate, hitting one million users in 2010, ten million in 2011 and 20 million in 2012. With users worldwide hard at work to personalize their space on the web, problems inevitably arose that warranted the attention of a live agent.  The next step for Wix was to either find a cloud-based service or to build its own call center supported by a reliable, scalable telecommunications API.

Wix shopped around for telephony service and initially decided to sign up for a cloud-based app. But Wix quickly outgrew the service. To meet the company’s need for more visibility into call center performance and to quickly roll out new features, Wix built the Wix Call Center.

“What we could do with the Wix Call Center was actually more robust than what our provider could do,” said Jamison Moore, director of U.S. sales and support.

The company still needed a solid telephony platform, however, it didn’t make sense for Wix to continue to pay high monthly per user fees for functionality it was not using. The Wix team considered building an internal PBX, but quickly decided to focus development efforts on those features that added the most value to their business. That meant leaving connections to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) to the experts.

In the end, Wix chose to leverage the Twilio API instead.  “We wanted a reliable platform that could support our rapidly growing call center, and Twilio’s flexible API fit perfectly within our model,” Moore said. “Twilio handles the backend telephony while we focus on building a better call center.”

With Twilio, Wix benefited from a highly reliable telephony service that could terminate calls and send SMS messages all over the world. In addition, the flexibility of the Twilio API meant Wix developers could add new features to their call center at any time and continuously improve their customers’ experience. The overall cost of ownership was also lower because there was no per user fee.

Once the decision to implement Twilio had been made, a developer was able to integrate Twilio with the Wix Call Center in six weeks, complete with computer-telephony integration and an interactive voice response system.

“I found Twilio’s API documentation very well written, leaving the API extremely accessible to use,” said Justin Van Koten, lead developer on the project. “Their unique TwiML and conference features enabled me to build a fully functional, scalable call center.”

Additional features of the Twilio-powered Wix Call Center included an advanced system of queuing calls and case and contact management, as well as a call recording and call monitoring system so managers can work with agents to improve their performance.

The availability of detailed call event information also enhanced the reporting capabilities of Wix’s app. Those capabilities include aggregating data in graphs to compare real-time metrics like the average processing time of a call, the average wait time, the average call abandonment rate, as well as more granular analysis such as the performance of specific channels and queues or determining things like average call length during specific hours of the day broken down by individual call queue and/or agent.

Instead of using IP phones, Wix switched to the Twilio Client, making it possible for agents to make and receive phone calls directly from their browsers. The move simplified the agents’ workflow, so they were able to focus their full attention on satisfying customers.

“Twilio’s technology started where ours left off, so it was a great marriage,” Moore said.