Suzie says she’s one of those rare species of people that’s been with the same group for her whole corporate career. She started at Insignia in B2B sales and says what she loved most in that role was learning about the businesses and the inspiring brands she worked with.

It was 2001 when Suzie joined the Winson Group and, in the past 20 years, she says she’s seen the business double in size, twice. With growth comes opportunity, and Suzie has never been afraid to run with the bulls.

Her career pivoted when she returned from maternity leave and was asked to spearhead a project to look at integrating a new CRM across both Insignia and Signet. She jumped in and worked closely with the IT team to select and implement the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform across the group’s sales and customer experience teams. Simultaneously, they executed marketing automation across the call centers.

Later, she worked on a digital transformation project with Insignia’s field service and technical service departments. They went from using dockets and very manual triple, or quadruple, key-in processes, to re-platforming (Microsoft 365) and automating texts with mobile apps.

She became Head of Customer Experience and worked steadily on website and digital marketing, which was quickly becoming the number one lead source. As that channel grew, she was heavily involved in SEO and paid search—an area of her role she especially loved.

Just when Suzie was realising she wanted digital to be her specialty, some divine timing occurred­­—the group’s MD approached her with an opportunity over at Signet to head up the Digital and Direct Marketing team. “Our GM of Signet is Matt Henry, who is really well known and regarded as a great digital guy in the Australian industry and has an awesome management team of people who are quite specialised in their field. I was like, okay, I’ll jump brands and go work for Signet.”

Moving into her digital role has been the highlight of Suzie’s career. She speaks passionately of the people and culture within her team­­­­—she says they jokingly call themselves ‘a MarTech dream team’. There’s an admirable, seldom-seen symbiosis between the marketing and IT teams­­—one that is highly productive and underpinned by mutual respect.

One of her first tasks was to look at a re-platforming of the website. They’d been on a custom-built site for 12 years, and it was time to get onto a best-practice platform with more security and stability.

As Suzie’s team embarked on a journey through significant tech stack selections and a platform migration, they put out an RFP for an agency partner. After a thorough process, they chose to team up with Overdose.

Knowing it was going to be a long-term process, Suzie explains how having a cultural fit was critical for them when selecting a digital partner. Reflecting on the process, she says from the start, there was great synergy with Overdose and that played out beneficially as the project progressed and as they had to jump hurdles—like global pandemics—along the way.

“It’s a big commitment. You’re signing on for a couple of years of your life and you’re going to spend a lot of money and you want to make sure that the partner that you’ve chosen can not only do the work technically, but you like them, and you want to spend all that time with them.”

“It’s almost like being in a relationship,” Overdose’s Laura agrees. “Particularly in that delivery stage and it’s probably a good three, four, even more, months where our clients speak to our team every single day—the same time every day—and it can be monotonous.”

Fortunately, the cultural alignment was there, and they are all still happily on speaking terms.

The digital transformation took almost two years to get to their current point where they’ve moved to Magento and simultaneously built two new sites—one for Signet, one for Insignia.

There’s a new, Covid-induced reality where we are forced to be online more, and face-to-face less. In this new environment, it can be tricky to uphold a sense of culture and keep up human connectivity, especially for a business, like Signet, where culture is a much-revered value.

Covid has also delivered a new era of working arrangements. Many businesses, including Signet, have implemented a system of coming into the office two or three days a week and working from home a couple of days a week. Suzie considers it a positive change. “Prior to Covid, I was in the office every day. As a full-time working mum, that could be really hard to manage. Even though there are challenges working from home and having kids at home as well, there’s something really nice about seeing your kids more—even if you are working, they can come and say hello.”

A flexible working environment adds to the challenge of keeping a corporate culture alive. Especially given people often chose to work for a particular company because of the culture, the people, and the office environment. At Signet, they’re working on finding a way to get everyone to connect as a group at least once a week.

Ultimately, it comes down to striking a balance between connectivity and flexibility.

Laura and Suzie have a shared passion for providing opportunities to young people—helping them get a start on their careers and then nurturing their talent and growth. Signet and Insignia have had a graduate program in place for about 20 years. It’s a structured, two-year program led by the Head of CX in collaboration with their People and Culture team. Suzie explains that all graduates start in the call center because, as a B2B company, the business has a large phone and email channel. “When they start there,” Suzie says, “they get that real foundation across the whole business—they get to know and learn our customers, our product, the culture, how things work, our ERP system, our CRM system. And then they tend to branch out from there.”

Aside from learning on the job, the graduates are taken away for conference weekends involving guest speakers on a range of topics, although Covid put a halt to this for a while and they had to change tack. In lieu, they ran a virtual webinar series with external speakers to keep stimulating the graduates and encourage their professional growth.

They run anywhere from 20 to 25 graduates across the group. In the past, the majority were sales and marketing graduates, but these days is more of a mix with supply chain graduates and HR. Many of the grads go into permanent roles—Suzie says about half her team right now has come through the graduate program. And, many have progressed to senior leadership positions, which really goes to show how successful a graduate program can be when offered by a company dedicated to, and passionate about, fostering young talent.

Signet had some pretty major changes during their digital transformation, especially migrating from a custom ecommerce platform to Magento. Although it’s still early days, Suzie says the tech stack choices all seem to be panning out really well. “I think we’re definitely happy with the selection of Magento and could see throughout the project how complex some of the requirements were, and we just wouldn’t have been able to do these things with some of the SaaS platforms we had thought might have been an option.”

At Signet, they’re consciously using a B2C approach, which, for a B2B business, is a really forward-thinking attitude. They recognize that at the end of the day, business customers are still people who deserve enjoyable customer experiences. “Our big focus this year is personalisation,” says Suzie. “We’re using the Nosto platform for that—both for the product recommendation, but also for the content personalisation.”

When a B2B business uses consumer tech, there can be a lot of customisation required, and Signet has especially found this with the email platform, which is taking longer than anticipated to integrate. “Probably in hindsight, it would have been good to be working on that one a little bit earlier than we had planned,” says Suzie.

Also, at Signet, there is a massive range in the purchasing power of customers—from Client X who’s spending half a million dollars a year, to Client B who’s at $50,000—mum-and-dad businesses versus the top-end-of-towns. These ecosystems of client groups, all with their different pricing structures, provide many layers of complexity. “When someone from a company logs in to our website, we want them to see their negotiated contract price,” Suzie explains. “Or, when the customer does an on-site search, or if product a recommendation is made to them, it’s got to be their price.”

Another big consideration when selecting the tech stack was the need for out-of-the-box integrations between tool X, Y, and Z. In a B2B environment, that’s particularly important because of the need for more customisation, or for creating different workflows, or to cater to those different customer groups at different pricing levels—not to mention the sheer volume of SKUs and product categories.

Perseverance in working through all the challenges has culminated in a sophisticated, all-encompassing ecommerce solution with all the bells and whistles—UX, SEO, information architecture, keyword research, performance marketing, fee connections.

Signet is predicting some really significant growth in the coming year, driven by their new digital landscape. Reflecting back, Suzie says while they always had a very solid, well-performing website, they were really ‘standing still’ with the previous technology. It was custom, but not best-practice, which meant even small enhancements would cost a lot of money and there were a lot of things they wanted to do but couldn’t. “Now we’ve re-platformed, we’ve got heaps of plans. And I think even just little things, like now we can integrate with a better Google shopping feed—something we couldn’t do before because of the platform. That’s already giving us extra results.”

Other benefits include Magento’s superior handling of SEO and greatly improved responsiveness on the mobile site. Before, they didn’t engage in mobile advertising because the site was awful from a UX perspective.

Another area Suzie says she’s excited about is the AI-driven personalisation and cross-sell, which was also not possible with the old platform. “We’re so excited to be using Nosto and see what kind of results we can get from that, especially because we’ve got that really large SKU count and lots of different categories and so many opportunities there.”

With their best-practice tech stack in place, it’s going to be all the little things that contribute to growth. After what was a massive year re-platforming, Suzie says it’s time to give the team a little bit of a break now—they’ve done the hard work.

Now, it’s the technology’s turn to shine.

Michele Landis and her co-founders started Accessible360 (A360, for short) with a resolute vision: a digital world that is accessible to all. Their mission is equally steadfast: create and maintain digital environments which offer equal access. 

Their passion for inclusivity and accessibility comes from the core: co-founder Aaron Cannon was born blind and became a software engineer. As a full-stack web developer working at an agency, Aaron could code in a ton of different languages. 

A360 has a team of auditors—some are blind, some are sighted—all with a technical background. Michele explains what they do is reconcile the experience of a physically-able user with that of a user with a disability. They follow an auditing process and cover four disabilities: visual, physical, cognitive, and auditory.

They work across many organisations and industries including ecommerce, education, financial, healthcare, government, law firms, and real estate.

To understand more of the role A360 plays, let’s first look at the accessibility space it occupies:

Accessibility, in the digital space, is the practice of removing the barriers which prevent interaction with websites, apps, and internet-based systems for people with disabilities. 

In many countries, accessibility is enforced by law: in the U.S., the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in 1990 and prohibits discrimination “on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations offered by businesses.”

Notably, the ADA was passed before the internet as we now know it existed. The Act did not, nor does it yet, have any language in it specifically speaking about digital properties. However, the U.S. Department of Justice has taken the position that the ADA applies to websites, mobile apps, and ‘Internet of Things.’ 

It’s hard to argue that the internet is not publicly available, and the same goes for apps. So, by default, the Act covers digital, as well as physical, accessibility for the disabled. “If you think about ramps and all that kind of stuff out in the physical space, that’s what they meant when they wrote it,” Michele explains. “Of course, they didn’t have the vision of the world we’re all in now.” 

In other words, to avoid discriminating against people with disabilities, digital products must be designed to be accessible.

Digital property includes websites, web applications (apps), native mobile apps, PDFs, or ‘Internet of Things’ products (such as smart home components, programmable thermostats, appliances, and fitness gadgets).

With Covid, many non-digital product or service offerings became digital—such as fitness classes online—and it happened so rapidly that consideration of accessibility may not have even been on the radar.

Michele says it’s really about thinking holistically about your organisation, from your broadcasts, meeting platforms, right down to sign-up forms. “When was the last time you filled out a paper application? It doesn’t exist anymore.”

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is an internationally recognised standard for assessing digital properties and is a highly useful tool for businesses.

In America, The Department of Justice, many well-known advocacy organisations, and a tremendous amount of case law all support the fact that digital products must comply with the WCAG.

However, WCAG alone is not enough to provide fully accessible sites and apps. Universal design, providing rich, intuitive experiences for all users, should be the goal while also meeting the standards.

WCAG is primarily intended for:

• Web content developers (page authors, site designers, etc.)
• Web authoring tool developers
• Web accessibility evaluation tool developers
• Others who want or need a standard for web accessibility, including for mobile accessibility

Link to the WCAG website here: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). 

Michele explains the WCAG standards are applied regardless of the country you’re in—they are what digital experts, agencies, and auditors use the world over.

There are some differences though—such as the way administrations in the EU and UK are more involved in the regulation. “But they don’t necessarily have more compliant apps or more compliant websites,” she says. “In my observations, Europe and the UK are a little bit behind us.”

The ADA is more or less entirely enforced by litigation, in other words, by plaintiff activity. Known to be a far more litigious nation than most, the U.S. has seen a high volume of accessibility proceedings before the courts. And that’s on top of most cases—about 90%—which are settled out-of-court. 

The worry for a business at the end of a lawsuit is the expensive fact you can get sued multiple times and in multiple places. Michele explains: “If you operate a website, you can have one plaintiff attorney sue you in a district court in New York, and you can have another plaintiff sue you in California.”

It definitely pays to be proactive if you want to avoid an unexpected lawsuit threat letter arriving on your desk.

Many people hear about accessibility laws for the first time and admit they had no idea of their obligations. Michele says, “It’s happened to me so many times where a VP of digital will be sitting on the phone and they’ve been in that job 10, 15, 20 years, and there’s this pause, and they say, ‘I never knew anything about this. I never thought about this.’”

Awareness is just the beginning; complying is the longest step. 

Fortunately, there’s widespread willingness to comply: “I can count on my hand,” Michele says, “how many people, once they learned about this, didn’t want to do better. We have a couple of bad eggs out where, but otherwise, everybody, once they know better, they want to do better.”

Most often, it’s a retrofit situation where the business didn’t initially design with accessibility in mind and they need to put things right; however, more and more organisations are aware of the need for accessibility from the get-go and are building compliant websites and apps from the ground up.

Michele says, “It’s like going to the doctor, getting diagnosed, getting on a treatment protocol, becoming well, and then maintaining that wellness. In this case, wellness is accessibility.”

When undergoing a compliance project with a client, A360 do a live-user audit (the diagnosis), then the developers are told exactly how to fix everything (the treatment protocol), and finally, the client is told how to maintain everything on the front-end (through content marketing, for example).

More specifically, there is a three-step process, a roadmap, A360 has developed for a business to become accessible:

The A360 Roadmap

1. Assess Your Environment

• Scope your needs
• Live-user audits
• Review new designs
• Customised fixes

1. Enable Accessible Processes

• Development support
• Experienced help desk
• Knowledge base & training
• Reduce risk

1. Stay Accessible and Compliant

• Quality assurance testing
• Regular live assessments
• Automated assessments
• Process improvement

How long it takes to climb to the top of the compliance mountain depends on how far up you are when you start. And the same goes for the cost, which very generally speaking could be in the range of $5,000 – $25,000, or more.

During the process which may take several months, A360 assist their clients to publicly advise they are undergoing an accessibility transformation by posting an ‘accessibility statement’. It states that they are aware of the need and while they are working on it, they have other ways for you to get help (e.g. by phoning). 

There are tools a merchant can utilise as an interim fix—toolbars, certain widgets—which are basic solutions for things like increasing font or adjusting contrast. 

From a liability standpoint, these measures will at least give some time to get through the process without having to be fielding demand and threat letters.

Some people have a basic level of knowledge when it comes to digital accessibility, primarily about device-integrated tools such as colour contrast, font properties, etc.

Examples of common accessibility tools:

• Alternative Text for Images Images should include equivalent alternative text (alt text) in the mark-up/code which ensures the information is available to people who are blind, by enabling a screen reader that reads aloud the information on a page.
• Keyboard Input Some people cannot use a mouse, including many older users with limited fine motor control. An accessible website does not rely on the mouse; it makes all functionality available from a keyboard. Then people with disabilities can use assistive technologies that mimic the keyboard, such as speech input.
• Transcripts for Audio Just as images aren’t available to people who can’t see, audio files aren’t available to people who can’t hear. Providing a text transcript makes the audio information accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as to search engines and other technologies that can’t hear. It’s easy and relatively inexpensive for websites to provide transcripts.

There are overlay tools, widgets, plug-ins, pieces of JavaScript, etc. that can be downloaded. 

Michele says these overlay tools are often promoted as an easy solution—use these and you don’t have to fix the core code. She’s skeptical and says she’s yet to see one that works as well as it’s pitched.

Some businesses have two separate websites as a way around fixing their core code. When a person goes to a website they are asked to self-identify as having a disability, if they do, they click into another digital experience.

This can be really complicated when a business carries out updates to their site(s) not to mention the inefficiency of having to maintain two websites.

Michele applies an analogy to the duplicate sites of a school hallway. You wouldn’t have two separate entry doors—one for one human and a different door for another? Wouldn’t you just have everybody go through the same door and offer accessibility built into it? 

Think about it. Having a different option for a person with a disability, is, by its very nature, discriminatory.

Michele says “Fix the core code. Fix it once. Fix it once and for all.”

Michele explains how accessibility is tied closely with SEO: when you’re improving SEO, you’re marking up everything; you’re making sure that everything, every link, is labeled; all the headings are correct, etc. This amelioration of HTML is exactly what builds a really solid foundation for accessibility.

The relationship between the two is exemplified by original SaaS tools, or bots, which were used to scan websites for SEO—companies that offered these devices were able to pivot and start marketing them for accessibility.

There have been some innovations in the digital accessibility space—such as scanning or automation tools for accessibility testing. A360 have their own scanning tool, as do most accessibility consultants. Michele says don’t they don’t use theirs upfront in the diagnosis, it’s used more in the maintenance phase. She says while helpful to find some low-hanging fruit, generally scanning tools only cover about 25% of the web content accessibility guidelines, so additional manual testing needs to be done as well.

Firstly, when you’re building something digital, put the accessibility foundation in as you’re building it. Get an accessibility compliance expert involved in a new project, during the discovery and architecture phase, to ensure site designs are working toward accessibility compliance.

Secondly, choose wisely, and spend money wisely. Michele strongly advises that any money you spend on digital accessibility, should at first be spent on a live-user audit.  

Then there are little things a business can do on an ongoing basis to self-regulate, such as:

• Pay attention to all your external-facing digital properties. 
• Consider what you can do on your business’s social media. You can add alt texts on Facebook and Twitter, for example.
• Don’t forget to look internally as well—think about how are you communicating with your employees? Are you using a fully accessible screen share system? Is the meeting platform fully accessible? 
• Ensure your code works across a broad range of assistive technology.

Familiarise yourself with what’s out there for persons with disabilities, so that you can create a really thoughtful experience for them.

People with disabilities are likely to be accessing a website or a mobile app with their own assistive technology already in place. They’ve likely got screen reader software such as JAWS or NVDA on their computers and mobile devices. It could be a ‘sip and puff’ technology—think of Christopher Reed and how he operated the web—literally by inhaling and exhaling to simulate one keystroke.

It’s the merchant or agency’s job to make sure their underlying code works across a myriad of different assistive technology.

Michele recommends that if you’ve never listened to JAWS or heard a screen reader in action, then look into it to get an understanding. A360 has a YouTube channel featuring these types of technologies.

For merchants using third-party SaaS technologies in their tech stacks where does their liability as a merchant end and that of the tech platform begin? If, say, you’re using a checkout technology that you have no control over, are you liable?

Michele says the third-party contract needs to cover this and should be closely inspected. You can also ask your third-party provider if they are accessible compliant. 

She says at A360 they’re starting to see a lot more third-party providers come through as a spin-off from the retail sites they audit. “Inevitably, we audit a site, and they have these third-party things on there, and then the client shares the information and the conversation starts about, ‘what are you doing about this?’” If they aren’t up to speed, you can encourage them to get an independent third-party audit. Contract re-signing time is a good time to raise the issue of accessibility, and perhaps put some pressure on.

Michele says there’s good movement in the right direction. “What I see is very encouraging. I see a tremendous amount of third-party providers getting their stuff done and getting their house in order.”

Accessibility compliance is important. It’s complicated. There is no quick fix. 

It applies to all your digital properties, going beyond just the front-end of the website—all marketing initiatives, email, and social media.

“Merchants absolutely must dig in and develop their roadmap to get compliant because this is not going away, nor should it, because frankly, as we talked about, at the outset, websites and digital properties should be accessible to everyone,” Michele says, returning to her company’s vision.

The best thing you can do is get started, get yourself protected, and open up your business for everyone to access, equally.

Dov was employee number nine or ten at Yotpo when it was just getting off the ground. He started in support, then quickly moved into managing events, and then managing business development and starting up the partner team.

By nature of being a people-heavy organisation, Dov says Yotpo was difficult to scale up. “It becomes very, very difficult to manage at scale, and a lot of things, especially in a SaaS company, end up being very repetitive and you’re just having the same conversations with partners.”

The Tolstoy idea came from the pains Dov experienced at Yotpo. He had been thinking for years about whether there was a way to provide the benefit of face-to-face communication in a self-service asynchronous video platform.

Eventually, he made it happen—he jumped out of Yotpo, teamed up with his Tolstoy co-founder, and together, they built the platform to answer those pains. Yotpo became one of Tolstoy’s earliest customers.

Just before the arrival of Covid, Dov was grappling with a way to launch Tolstoy; there was some resistance in using video to communicate rather than in-person. Personal connection was preferred—people wanted to meet in person, go to conferences, and so forth.

From an ecommerce perspective, people were used to shopping online from the comfort of their homes or beds—they could do it in their pajamas or their underwear, but the idea of engaging in live video seemed terrifying and far too intrusive.

When a global pandemic came along the option to meet in person was taken away. Instead, we turned on video chat, joined video meeting platforms, and we all became more comfortable interacting over video.

It’s a different world we live in today and people have fewer qualms about being on live video from home. Besides, tech such as Tolstoy is one-way video where you can see them, but they can’t see you. Understanding this creates more ease for users.

So, in the end, Covid’s timing was impeccable for Tolstoy. Dov says it was the push they needed “to actually jump and do this thing.”

Tolstoy was originally designed for SaaS businesses—as a B2B sales tool. It was pitched as a way for companies to have face-to-face conversations with their leads and customers without having to maintain and manage an army of sales reps.

Soon after launching, Dov realised it has ecommerce applications as well. Regardless of whether it’s B2B or B2C, it’s about conversing face-to-face with customers and increasing conversions. Ultimately, it’s a new way to communicate, and it’s already taken off across a number of different verticals.

How brands can use Tolstoy:

• Tell a brand’s individual story and show the people behind it
• Personal shopper – personalised recommendations
• Explain (and show) complex products and product categories
• Recommend bestsellers
• Welcome bot
• Interactive FAQ
• How-to videos

How does it work?

Jump onto Tolstoy and follow a simple step-by-step process:

1. Record a few short video clips on your phone. At the end of each clip, you can ask your visitors a question.
2. Use the drag-and-drop builder to stitch the videos together.
3. Create different flows for each type of customer.
4. Embed your Tolstoy anywhere on your site, with the click of a button. You can publish it as a video chatbot, an embedded video, or share it in an email.
5. Get notified whenever a visitor engages with one of your Tolstoys.
6. Get deep insights about each visitor, and easily create super-smart segmentation.

It’s worth checking out some examples on the Tolstoy website to get a feel for how it all comes together: https://www.gotolstoy.com/our-favourites

Presenting your brand ambassador…

Businesses can use their Tolstoys as they would a brand ambassador, or an influencer, for guided selling. On the flipside, for the customer, it’s akin to having a personal shopper.

It changes up the chore of reading…

A website full of copy can be tiresome to read—like FAQs for example, so when a Tolstoy is deployed to make content into an engaging interactive video, it’s a better experience.

Getting to the nitty-gritty of what the customer wants…

The customer can be asked by the presenter/brand ambassador/personal shopper a series of questions such as ‘which products are you interested in?’ or, if, say, the product is skincare, ‘what type of skin do you have?’ The questions can be at a basic level, or more in-depth and can home in on pain points.

“You can get really, really deep just as you would in a store or in a conversation and really start to identify who the person is in a really deep way, I think for the first time,” explains Dov.

Despite initially setting out with B2B SaaS in mind, once launched, Tolstoy saw a myriad of businesses coming to them all looking to leverage the tech: “There’s no way to classify them, this thing solves a lot of different types of pain points.”

“We haven’t figured out if there is a sweet spot for this,” says Dov, “or is it just a new way to communicate? And just like in communication, you can do anything with it. That’s where we’re leaning after a lot of soul searching about this because we tried to shut out that noise, but we realised this is actually the opportunity to build something super horizontal.”

B2B sales: In a B2B setting, the salesperson can pitch to leads like it’s one-to-one, but at scale. The presenter need only record the video once but can send it out to hundreds or thousands of different people. All are having the same conversation, yet it feels personal.

HR:  There’s an HR use case—Tolstoy themselves are using it this way. Prospective employees send in videos of themselves using the technology to talk about themselves and present their resumes in a video format.

High ticket items:Tolstoy is gaining popularity with sellers of expensive products—where customers need the personal touch, authenticity, and emotional connection; they feel the need to speak to someone before putting down $3,000, $5,000, $10,000 on a product online.

Guided selling: Take for example, a merchant selling power tools. When you come to the website, the Tolstoy kicks off and asks, ‘Hey, what are you looking for today? Is it drills? Is it saws? Is it something else?’ Or it could be a brand with a ton of different SKUs. Some businesses have tens of thousands of SKUs, and people are confused on the website and don’t know what to buy. Tolstoy can provide a new way to help customers navigate in a guided sell fashion.

And then there are complex products or those that need a lot of education. Merchants may traditionally have trouble explaining how to use the product, what it does, or how it’s different. In this case, customers need someone who’s an expert to walk them through the products and help them find the right one.

The aim is to be as deeply integrated as possible. Ideally, a customer would go onto the Tolstoy and be able to complete the entire experience—view the product, read the reviews about it, make a buying decision, add it to the cart—all within the Tolstoy.

As well as being an engagement platform and a conversion funnel optimisation tool, it’s also a data tool. “We collect really, really deep data about your customers and your leads—data that there’s no other way to get besides getting them on the phone or talking to them in person, which is not always possible,” says Dov.

Once collected, brands can add the data to a CDP, or CRM, or they can use Tolstoy’s CRM, or email marketing tool, and create different kinds of smart segments based on how the users answer or what paths they take.

Dov says it can be any way you can put it as an I-frame embedded. “You can place Tolstoy however you want—we have companies placing us in different pages and in ways that are surprising to us. And then we make that out-of-the-box.”

Tolstoy has been working really well as a pop-up modal, such as being deployed for an exit intent—someone’s about to leave and you can have a Tolstoy person coming up and having a conversation or asking them why they want to leave.

In another use, brands are placing Tolstoys as a hovering widget, similar to a chatbot. Dov explains they don’t have chat capabilities, so it’s neverinstead of a chatbot—it’s usually either above or below the chatbot or on the other side of the page. It’s calling your attention to it, to have a conversation with you.

In any given tech stack, there could be potentially 10, 12, or 15 different modals, so it’s good to know Tolstoy is highly integrative—it is designed to seamlessly integrate with thousands of existing marketing tools.

Tolstoy is often placed at the front of the customer journey—as the first thing someone sees—so as to build a personal connection. In this first engagement spot, it helps to identify what the person wants—for instance, do they want to talk to a live rep and do a live selling session, or do they have a chat question or a support question. “We can then open up or they can click to show what they want,” Dov explains, “or they can type it out or they can say it, and then we’ll open up. We’ll disappear and open up the chatbot so that it feels like a seamless experience on the viewer side, but we disappear. We feel like we’ve done our job at that point.”

It’s really just replicating the exact thing that would happen in a physical store. Even at the end, just like a store rep, the Tolstoy can come back and say, ‘Hey, I’m really glad. I hope we answered your question. Do you have any other questions for us? Or do you want me to show you X, Y, or Z? Or do you want me to take you here?’

Call centers: Tolstoy can potentially help businesses reduce call center volume by providing FAQs and eliminating the need for customers to call.

Video responding: Viewers can respond with videos. For example, when a skincare customer is asked what their skin concern is, the customer can take a quick video of their face.

Post-purchase engagement:While presently Tolstoy is being used mostly at the top of the funnel to drive conversions there is potential for post-purchase engagement, such as driving UGC.

Coming from Yotpo, Dov knows more than anyone, it can be a challenge for a brand to drive UGC. Tolstoy can help out here: “Potentially,” says Dov, “you could send a Tolstoy out post-purchase as well and drive someone to a Yotpo to write a review, or sign someone up to a loyalty program or to the SMS program.”

It’s harder to say no to a person asking you directly than it is to ignore an email.

Personal life: One of the biggest challenges for Dov has been finding time for a personal life, “which I don’t have,” he says.

Building the team and the relationships: In the beginning, it was getting to know his co-founder as a partner and building a strong relationship there. Then, as they grew and other people came on board, there were more relationships to build and strengthen. “It’s been a good challenge in the sense that I feel like we’re all growing from it.”

The daily juggle: Building a company from scratch requires doing so many different things at the same time.

Emotional struggle: Emotionally dealing with growing a business is a constant struggle. “I think maybe the biggest challenge is the emotional side, especially in the early, early days—a feeling every day of ‘Is this going to give value? Are we going to be able to raise money? Are we going to be able to do this?’ And just having to take that on.”

As things tracked along in the right direction, ease began to set in. Dov says they started to realise they were providing value, they were able to raise money, and so forth. “It started to make us feel a little bit safer.”

Back in the beginning, when the initial idea was to automate the sales process by providing a video sales mechanism for SaaS businesses, Dov and his business partner needed to validate their idea before they took it to market.

“The idea was to make the experience for people buying SaaS software a lot more fun because, personally, I don’t like having to get on a demo that ends up being a qualification call with the 20-year-old SDR who I feel knows less than I do about the industry. Just the whole process felt very antiquated.”

To test and validate the idea, they needed to render a complex sales process into an interactive video script. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they used Yotpo as the test case and built out a script. It was much harder than they expected—the script got really complicated and was taking too long.

They finally cracked it after realising they needed to just keep it simple, and not try to replicate a real conversation—make simple paths and keep it structured.

They showed the script to Yotpo, convincing them to try it out—it worked and Yotpo are still using it today; anytime a partner signs up for a demo of Yotpo, they get sent to Tolstoy.

The results for Yotpo have been phenomenal—the Tolstoy conversion rate is higher than a real person can achieve.

The current growth stream is largely by way of visibility on the web—word-of-mouth, funnily enough—brands see other brands using Tolstoy and want to jump on the bandwagon for their own brand.

The other large mechanism for Tolstoy’s growth is partnership building––partnering with shopping platforms like Shopify and with agencies like Overdose. “I think agencies in general are a really, really strong play for us. I think there’s a lot of value for agencies also in managing this process and building the content and managing and optimizing the data and the analytics.”

As a self-confessed conference groupie, Dov says he cannot wait to get back into the conference circuit and showcase Tolstoy to the industry. It’s a somewhat ironic admission, given Tolstoy replaces in-person relationship building, but we think it’s a great thing for humankind that we still sometimes want to be in the same room, not just on the same screen.

It’s a new era of communication and customer engagement,  the interactive video space is going from niche to the norm, and Tolstoy is already totally owning it.

Gotolstoy.com