Dixa nabs $105M to unify customer service channels

Dixa, a startup developing conversational customer engagement software, today announced that it raised $105 million in a series C funding round led by General Atlantic, with participation from Notion Capital and Project A. CEO Mads Fosselius says that the proceeds will be put toward product development, new acquisitions following Dixa’s purchase of Melbourne-based Elevio in January, and quadrupling Dixa’s engineering team by the end of 2022.

The customer service industry remains fragmented and built around specific channels of engagement. Call center providers use the phone as a dominant channel, for example, while ticketing system providers focus on transactional experiences. The stakes are high — 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company, according to Microsoft.

Founded in Denmark in 2015 and launched to market in 2018, Dixa aims to help brands increase revenue through improved customer experiences. The platform allows brands to unify channels in a single system, equipping agents with tools like cross-channel prioritization, routing capabilities, and integrations. Dixa offers a phone system that runs in any web browser. And it provides email workflows as well as support for chat apps including Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

“Dixa was founded with the mission to transform customer service and evolving an industry focused on efficiency and problem-solving to be a value driver for every business,” Fosselius told VentureBeat via email. “One of the foundations of Dixa’s vision and platform is the agent experience and the understanding that it’s tightly connected to customer experience. Today, customer service agents are disempowered by tools and standards that don’t allow them to provide a great customer experience. Agent experience is built into the core of Dixa — empowered with these capabilities, agents can become drivers of business outcomes.”

Automating customer service

While Dixa emphasizes the human element of customer service, it applies AI to some self-service experiences in addition to back-office tasks. According to Fosselius, Dixa’s AI bolsters the contextual relevance of knowledge-based documents, recommending articles to agents depending on the scenario. The AI improves with customer feedback and interactions data, recasting interactions into ostensibly better customer experiences.

For example, Dixa’s AI can match customers with agents based on variables including knowledge, customer relationship management data, and interaction history.

“Today, consumers are spoiled with choice and expect a personalized and positive experience with every engagement, which today’s standard can’t provide,” Fosselius said. “This requires a paradigm shift and retiring outdated concepts like omnichannel that keeps businesses lagging behind. Dixa is focused on the customer journey that transcends beyond a specific channel or modality.”

Dixa, which has 200 employees spread across offices in Copenhagen, London, New York, Berlin, Kyiv, Tel Aviv, and Melbourne, competes with Kustomer, Zendesk, and Gladly in the over $7.54 billion customer experience management market. But the company has established a sizeable foothold over the past three years, with more than 700 customers including Epic Games, Wistia, and Rapha.

“The need for brands to differentiate through a great customer experience as well as the introduction and uptake of digital channels only grew during the pandemic. We’ve seen great brands growing together with us during these challenging times,” Fosselius said.

The latest round of financing brings Dixa’s total raised to $155 million to date. The company previously closed a $36 million series B in February 2020, which was also led by Notion.