Naomi Rozenfeld is the EVP of Revenue at Wix Answers, where she leads the global Marketing and Sales strategy. Naomi is passionate about helping companies and start-ups provide best-in-class customer experiences and transforming the way companies provide Customer Support. She was previously the Director of GTM at Wix Answers and Head of Product Marketing at Wix.com. Prior to joining Wix.com, Naomi was an Entrepreneur and founded two travel start-ups.
Questions
- Could you share with us a little bit about your journey?
- Could you just share with us a little bit about what Wix provides and how you’re able to meet your customer’s expectations based on what the market is looking for?
- In terms of customer experience and Wix being able to fulfil that for their customers, what are some of the ways that you differentiate yourself from other service providers that give that same kind of service?
- Could you share with us maybe what’s one online resource, tool, website, or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
- In your journey, in your professional journey and even in your personal journey, are there any books that have had the biggest impact on you, books that have really inspired you? Maybe could you share one or two with us?
- We have a lot of listeners who are business owners, some of them are managers in organizations where they are charged with the responsibility of enhancing customer experience, building customer loyalty, and they feel they have great products and services, but they lack the constantly motivated human capital. If you are sitting across the table from one of those persons, what’s the one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business?
- Could you share with us maybe one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about – maybe something you’re working on to develop yourself or your people.
- Where can they find you online?
- Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge you’ll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track or keep you focused on what you need to achieve or get through?
Highlights
Naomi’s Journey
Naomi shared that quite a long time ago; she started her journey as an entrepreneur. She always had this dream to build her own business, be her own boss. And she set out on that journey; she would say a pretty young age. She started her first startup, she was always very passionate about the travel space, it seemed ripe for disruption, or there were a lot of startups trying to tackle a lot of everyday problems that people had when it came to traveling.
She founded her first startup with two other founders, which quickly actually turned into a full on business that was just running already by itself. They had won a really big tender from the Jerusalem municipality for travel and very quickly just became a business. She sold her shares there and she went on to found the second startup with another founder, also in the travel space, trying to tackle a completely different problem, which was more about travel marketplaces and just travel ideas.
And that one pretty much hit her in the face. She would say about a year into it, her co-founder and her had very different views of how they wanted to take that startup forward. And she’d found herself pretty much one year with a startup that she put a lot into just basically fizzling. So, she pretty much hit that 99% statistic of startups failing.
And at that point she had a friend who she’d known from one of the accelerator programs that she was part of that said to her, “Hey, I know that they’re trying to build a product marketing team at Wix, would you be interested if I connect you to somebody?” She was kind of broke looking for a job that was a little bit more stable and going to provide her with a little bit more stability. And she said, “Sure, why not?” Her idea was to go to Wix maybe for a couple of years, save up again and go back to being an entrepreneur. And here she is, six and a half years later, still at Wix.
What Does Wix Provides And Meeting Customer’s Expectations
Naomi shared that Wix is a pretty well known as a cloud-based web development company that makes it easy for anybody to have an online presence. And that could be everything from creating your website online, your portfolio, regardless of what business or vertical you’re coming from. And also to provide you with all of the tools that you need in order to maintain and to run your business on a daily basis. So, everything from managing your bookings to your payments, to your customers and all of that communication is pretty much what Wix is known for in the industry. And she had pretty much started in the marketing department, heading the product marketing team there. And there’s always been a very, very huge focus as a SAAS centric company on product.
And everything that they did in terms of marketing was about how do they enable their users, how do they inspire them? But there was always a very strong connection to the product.
And she would say about a couple years into her journey at Wix, she had heard about this new B2B product, something completely different than what they were doing at Wix. Wix is a very successful and large B2C company, today they have almost 200 million users around the world and there was this new initiative starting kind of inside of Wix that was looking to go to market. And basically what it was, was looking to take their home-grown, in-house built platform that they use for customer support at Wix, and to start basically offering that to other businesses. She was super intrigued; she met with Elad Eran who is the CEO of Wix Answers.
And he was basically running this project from day one. And she had met him for a cup of coffee, and she had heard about his vision. She would hear about customer support as something that was completely new to her. And she had known a lot about marketing, a lot about obviously like web tools being part of Wix and suddenly there was this new product that was completely unrelated to Wix, for total B2B in terms of its business model and its needs that was looking to basically launch out of the larger wix.com.
And she heard about his vision, she heard about this story and at that point, her knowledge on support was maybe Zendesk. She had known that Zendesk was a tool that you use, obviously for customer support for more than that, she didn’t really know. And she was so intrigued and excited to hear about where they saw this product going and that the same pain point that Wix was trying to solve for many years ago and building out this own in-house technology that was now also very relevant to other businesses 10 years later, she really want in on this. And, pretty much from that point, the rest is history and she has been with Wix Answers since that point.
What Are Some Ways Wix Differentiate From Other Service Providers
Naomi stated that this is a really good question, in terms of tooling and obviously looking at this industry, which is a very saturated space and a very competitive one at that.
Any business, regardless of how big or small you are, you’re always going to need tools to communicate with your customers, that’s really pretty much like the heart of every business is communicating with your customers and supporting them. And she thinks what really is different about Wix Answers is the story that kind of lies behind how this product came to be. And it’s a lot like AWUS when you think about it; the only difference is that they didn’t really create an industry. They were a real business that they were growing super fast. Wix was at the point of this tipping point of explosive growth; their users were growing by the millions.
They were a SAAS centric company; they really needed ways to connect the product teams, the marketing teams with the user voice. And from day one, they’ve always been very centered around capturing that user voice in terms of their future roadmap, their strategy, and really understanding where they were going as a company.
They looked in the market for tools and nothing really was able to capture all of that, nothing was really able to connect all of those dots or put knowledge at the hands of their users in the way that they had imagined it, nothing was really kind of connecting support to the internal part of the organization. It was always those traditional help desks, where you expect your users to go open a ticket, get a reply, and then you just solve that ticket and you’re done with that.
And they saw it as much more, they knew that their product teams are their future roadmap would had to be connected to the users. So, they set out on this journey to build this tool. Now, if you look in the market today, there’s a lot of different solutions that offer basically everything, you can connect all of your different channels. You obviously can have a lot of timeline view of your customers, but what really sets Wix Answers apart is the way they built the foundation of it.
So, all of your channels are just seamlessly connected into one single timeline. So, regardless of whether a user or a customer starts to chat with you, and then they want a call back, or they want to get an email, or you want to follow up with an article, everything is just the seamless transition between channels.
And that’s just pretty much a by-product of them building their own in-house technology. So, they don’t have third-party apps, and they don’t have third-party vendors that are integrated into their platform. Everything is just pretty much built in into one really cohesive product and platform.
And the end result is that your users have a much more seamless transition between any of your channels. You obviously have much pure and better customer data and just data at all. And the agents have one interface that is like that single source of truth about your customers. And that she would say is pretty much one of the biggest differentiators that they have today. And when it comes to like scale and doing things in high volume, they know a thing or two about that in terms of growing really quickly.
And there’s a lot of businesses that they talked to today, whether they’re startups or even really large scale operations that do things at high volume. And when you’re trying to do something at high volume, and you need to move the needle just a little bit, even if it’s just 1% or just a small fraction of making changes that has really large implications.
And what they found is that even smaller organizations like startups that were very lean and needed to move really quickly were suffering from the same thing that really large businesses were suffering from. And that was just a high dependency on development and high cost of running their operations, because they really needed that R and D dependency in order to move or to execute anything within the support organization.
And the way they had engineered and designed this platform was that pretty much, if you want to make a change between now and tomorrow, you want to launch a new channel, you want to change your entire help center. You have to pivot, or you need to just really quickly adapt, you’re able to do that without having to go to a project manager, who’s going to build it out or plan it for you. You don’t really need the developers to obviously start building that out for you and then launch. And that ability to go faster than ever, and to move and to iterate in a much faster way is really, really impactful for businesses today, especially when support and CX is really like the heart of any business and organization.
Me: I agreed, totally agreed. So, Wix has definitely been able to bridge that gap for a way that customers can communicate with their clients in a very easy, seamless, frictionless way. And people don’t like to jump through hoops, the less steps that they have to take the, the much better experience that they have. And you want them to feel motivated to interface with your platform.
App, Website or Tool that Naomi Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Her Business
When asked about an online tool that she cannot live without in her business, Naomi stated that she’s not sure that she’s going to be that creative with this one. It might actually sound a little bit mundane, but she feels that LinkedIn has pretty much changed her life and so many people around us.
She remembers when she started at this, business cards were a big deal, they still are. She has a whole bunch of business cards sitting in her bag waiting to be given out probably the next conference, if they’ll have one in the near future given this whole COVID situation.
But LinkedIn really made it easy to get to people that you would otherwise have a hard time getting through to. And she finds that so many interesting conversations, partnerships, relationships have just started on LinkedIn, and it’s just become like a tool that she really can’t live without, regardless of whether if it’s on a personal connection level or even within their business. Just reaching out to people and striking up a conversation around subject matter that’s important to you, it’s just really become easier than ever thanks to LinkedIn.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Naomi
When asked about books that had the biggest impact, Naomi stated that there’s a book that she read actually many years ago, it was about 5 years ago. She read this one with her son, they made it kind of like an everyday thing that she would read to him chapters in this book. And it’s actually written by RJ Palacio and the book is called Wonder, and it’s actually a children’s book.
She always thinks that somehow children’s books always have like very interesting messages about life in them and this one really kind of got to her. It was a story about a friendship and just how raw human relationships and how complex they can be sometimes. And obviously this was written for probably children between the age of 10 to 12, but it was just a really wonderful book that was just drawing a lot of depth in terms of human nature, friendships, fear, courage and that one kind of stuck with her.
Another book that she actually just finished as of recently, that’s more in the adults playing field is called Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan. And this one’s a very interesting book as well, they kind of title it as how pirates and dreamers, innovators can create and dominate markets.
And what she really, really loves about this one is that a lot of the way we look at things is just the mindset. And sometimes to really succeed at something, you just need to change the conversation or change the category, or just change the way you approach something. And it just really comes from this place of not being the follower, but just trying to find different ways to lead. And that’s been a book that she will probably be revisiting again, very well-written and some really good ideas in that one. It’s called Play Bigger.
Advice for Business Owners to Have a Successful Business
When asked about advice that she would give a business owners to have a successful business, Naomi mentioned definitely focus.
It sounds really simple and she can say first-hand, she has always struggled with this herself. Also, in the businesses that she has built and also with the teams that they lead today, especially when you’re working with talented people that have a lot of different ideas and especially when you’re building any new business, you want to pretty much just tackle it all.
And she would just say that sometimes focus is something that actually really motivates the teams, it sounds a little bit contrary or counter-intuitive because you can have a lot of really great ideas and people get highly motivated by them, but then trying to tackle too much too soon or not, all of your areas of strengths can sometimes be very de-motivating to teams and people that are helping you obviously grow your business and create the strategies and taking things forward on a daily basis. So, focus has tended to be something that, where she feels when there needs to be a push to motivation, just to look at everything, look at that one area that you can really do well at, obviously involve your teams, talk to them, and that focus has a tendency to kind of invigorate that sense of like, “Okay, we’re really going to go after this. We’re going to tackle it and we can really win.”
What Naomi is Really Excited About Now!
Naomi shared that there’s a lot of things that are going on right now. There’s definitely a project that she thinks they’ve been working on really, really hard that she knows is a cross team effort and was something that was really new and different that they were trying to launch.
And it’s a new community that they’re going to be launching next month, that’s going to actually be in the space of customer experience, and they’re looking to really create a whole new conversation with people and connect them in a way that they haven’t really been connected before in this space.
And it’s been something that they’ve been planning as a team for a very, very long time carefully considering the leaders, the brands, the emerging technologies and companies that they really wanted them to be part of this conversation. And she knows it was a huge cross team effort that they’ve been basically putting a lot of resources and focus on that. She would say that that’s something that right now they’re super excited about, and it’s going to be a really big one for them in terms of successfully launching this next month.
Where Can We Find Naomi Online
Naomi shared listeners can find her at –
LinkedIn – Naomi Rozenfeld
LinkedIn – Wix Answers
Website – www.wixanswers.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Naomi Uses
Naomi shared that there’s something that kind of stuck with her, she thinks more so as a woman and as a woman in business, also as a mother, she has two boys, but also a girl. So, she understand that the way that we want to sometimes lead things and prove our independence, sometimes we need to push a little bit harder than some of our counterparts.
And there’s definitely a quote that kind of stuck with her from Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It went something along the lines of, “My mother always told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant to be your own person, be independent.”
And that’s something that she pushed through on a lot is just being really, obviously your own person, to be independent, but also from the aspect of being a woman and what that means today, especially in the business world and leading teams and to see women obviously in positions of power and making really big decisions, that for her is like a quote that goes really far.
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Links
- Wonder by R.J Palacio
- Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan
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