Today, companies are embracing digital transformation in order to be agile and drive optimum growth. The adoption of next-gen technologies has fueled over the years but some organizations lack behind due to challenges like technology complexities. Whatfix is one of the market players that help organizations to operate at full capacity and leverage the latest technologies. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal interacted with Khadim Batti, CEO and co-founder, Whatfix to know about how they are empowering companies to maximize business outcomes and growth plans. Read below the excerpts:
Rajeev: Please tell us about Whatfix. How it all started and what was your vision while starting this venture?
Khadim: The Whatfix journey began in 2011 when Vara, and I decided to start our marketing DIY product called SearchEnabler, targeting SMBs. This was an on-demand SaaS tool that businesses could use to implement recommendations for enhancing their organic search visibility. While SearchEnbler received good traction and we were able to gather about 100 customers within a year, we faced a newer challenge – the product was not being adopted effectively as most customers wanted extensive support and hand-holding. Building smart flows to solve this core pain point led to the inception of Whatfix.
Whatfix offers a unique Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) that helps with simple in-app walkthroughs, videos, and guides for using new software solutions and features. In a world where sophisticated software such as CRMs, ERPs, and HCMs require significant training and time before they can be used to their full potential, we are enabling faster, more efficient onboarding and usage for all types of organizations. The platform is designed such that customization and authoring of outflows is one of the easiest. Whatfix content can be easily integrated with the learning management system (LMS) of the organizations and the entire engagement can be tracked in analytics for further modifications as well. Today, we play a significant role in the digital adoption process, while still allowing our customers to learn and adapt to digital transformation at their own pace.
Rajeev: How has been your business growth since the pandemic disrupted the market?
Khadim: 2020 has been a year of disruption and introspection as organisations accelerated the pace of digital transformation to counter the challenges of a global pandemic. During this time, Whatfix has been continuously innovating and supporting the evolving needs of our customers. Our investments in technology and expansion into new markets has enabled us to equip our customers with the tools they need to navigate their digital transformation journey.
We saw an uptick in customer usage of our Digital Adoption Platform and have seen a 2X increase in revenue. This was bolstered through the addition of over 130 enterprise customers including Center State Bank, Vivial, AkzoNobel, Ciena, Aurecon, and more, adding additional support for desktop and mobile applications, in addition to browser applications. Our team has simultaneously grown, with over 260 new hires globally, bringing the total number of employees to 583. We also strengthened our leadership team through three new executive hires including Satya Machiraju, VP of Information Security; Romita Mukherjee, Global Senior Director, HR; and Supriya Goswami, VP of Product Marketing.
Rajeev: What is the biggest challenge for companies like yours in this market?
Khadim: We are building a new category – Digital Adoption, and have been very successful in doing so. While many understand the problems we solve, they don’t necessarily understand that there is a solution available to them. The main challenge that we are currently tasked with is solving this.
We are invested in our mission to empower companies to maximize business outcomes by eliminating technology complexities for their users. We will continue to innovate while delivering enhanced customer experiences consistently.
Rajeev: What are your plans to drive innovations in this domain? How does your R&D/Development team work on bringing best solutions?
Khadim: At Whatfix, innovation is in our DNA. Our culture promotes deep dive, hustle mode and experimentation. We expect all employees to be hands-on and that helps us in not only discovering problem statements from the market perspective but also from internal processes and organization structuring.
With innovation at the heart of everything we do. For our new solutions, we sign up 3-4 of our existing customers, to be our innovation partners. We work very closely with them to elevate our solutions and also customer experience every day. We organize R&D Hackathons to ideate, design, develop and optimize. As the leader of the Digital Adoption Solutions category, we understand the importance of inorganic growth and the value it brings. Accordingly, we build the right mix of mergers and acquisitions of adjacent solutions and innovations.
We have Whatfix Labs where we rotate a few key R&D folks to join the CTO office every year and work on new ideas and concepts. Once validated, these move directly to our product roadmap. We have dedicated 20-30% effort to build differentiation in our R&D endeavors. The rest 70% of the effort goes into market requirements, customer demand and other key areas. We also have a customer advisory board for a few different domains, where we brainstorm with them on our roadmap and seek inputs to make it robust.
Rajeev: Please brief about your investment/growth plans by 2022.
Khadim: In June this year, we raised our Series D round of funding of $90 million. We shall continue to grow our teams to meet the high demand of the digital adoption space. Continuing to innovate is critically important to us, and we shall re-invest in the development and technology we provide.
Whatfix has a unique advantage in being able to integrate our solutions with almost any form of application. We now have the capability to focus not just on our existing customers, but expand the scale of our offerings to provide our services to enterprise organizations. Fortune 500 companies are continuing to replace their legacy vendors with us. We are currently focused on expanding Whatfix globally in the ANZ, EU, and SEA regions. We have also recently expanded our product footprint to desktop and mobile applications.