AvidXchange

How AvidXchange uses in-app messaging to enhance user experience

How AvidXchange deflected 20,000 support tickets in 12 months with Chameleon
How AvidXchange uses in-app messaging to enhance user experience

🤔 Challenge: How can a FinTech company with multiple products take off the heavy burden of their Support team while also enhancing user experience and increasing customer engagement?

💡 Solution: In-app messages and high-converting product tours that bring communication and training to where customers are – in the product itself

🏆 Outcome: 20,000 tickets deflected in 2021 alone, 3x registrants for educational events, and a growing community of product evangelists


AvidXchange is a leading provider of accounts payable (“AP”) automation software and payment solutions for middle-market businesses and their suppliers. AvidXchange’s software-as-a-service-based, end-to-end software and payment platform digitizes and automates the AP workflows for more than 8,000 businesses and it has made payments to more than 825,000 supplier customers of its buyers over the past five years. 

Since the pandemic started, AvidXchange’s flexible yet robust automation platform for accounts payable has quickly become a mission-critical backup system for a lot of businesses that needed to increase the automation speed. Teams were no longer in the office, so they needed to do everything through automated software. With more business came more communication from customers – and that was becoming a real problem.

Enter Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy at AvidXchange. Josh works within AvidXchange’s Customer Education department, which he built from scratch after transitioning from the Customer Onboarding team. And with his new role in digital service strategy came a new mission, and new problems:

Whenever there was a system-wide issue, we would send email blasts to thousands of customers, but tracking the open rate and how many customers we were reaching was increasingly difficult. That meant we then had hundreds of customers writing to our support team waiting for the answers they had already received in an unopened email.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

AvidXchange engineers started thinking about overcoming the problem and putting together a plan on how to build the in-app messaging system from scratch. The Product team put it on the roadmap and announced that it would take up to one year to build it, test it, and have a functional system running. Yikes.

It was a heavy burden on our team, and we needed to find a solution.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

Josh started to research solutions and was recommended Chameleon by one of their vendors. He did his research, explored the options, investigated what it would take to implement this solution, and presented Chameleon to the team.

As soon as I found out that Chameleon offers a Chrome extension and a simple JavaScript snippet that we can embed into our application and quickly get it going, I shared that with my team. Instead of a year-worth investment in time and resources in-house, we could have Chameleon up and running within 1-2 hours. It was an easy decision to make. And, more importantly, it was the right decision to make at the given moment. 

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

This was back in 2019. Today, Josh and AvidXchange are happy Chameleon customers, who recently expanded their usage to two additional platforms within the AvidXchange suite of tools. 

The more we learn about the Chameleon's capabilities, the more use cases we think of and our usage grows exponentially.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

20,000 cases deflected… and counting 

Ticket deflection is the main Chameleon use case for Josh’s team. AvidXchange is using simple one-step Tours to alert customers about the issues at hand, or Tooltips to quickly inform users about product updates – and it’s working!

In 2021, we’ve deflected almost 20,000 cases by using Chameleon for in-app messaging. Along with the enhanced user experience that Chameleon messages have provided, we're very happy with the results.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

As Josh further explains, they typically put out a banner step saying their technical teams are engaged in resolving an issue and that they would notify them once the issue is resolved. Using Chameleon’s advanced segmentation features, they can ensure the right users are seeing the right messages. You wouldn’t want to show Chrome users that there’s an issue with performance on Firefox browsers, right?

We can pass information from our software over to Chameleon to create targeted segments. It could be based on permission sets, the browser they're using, or certain access that they have. When we receive the data that a user saw the message about the error, we then target them again to show the resolution message. This has been a huge help in terms of not bombarding our whole customer base with unnecessary messages.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

Room to grow

AvidXChange knew from the start that they were going to use Chameleon for in-app alerts and tooltips for customer ticket deflection. When they first subscribed to Chameleon, they had two goals:

  1. Deflect support tickets and reduce the number of incoming tickets due to the missed notification via email

  2. Improve the customer experience by bringing communications and training to the application and communicating with customers at the moment of their interaction with the product 

What they didn't anticipate was the opportunities to leverage Chameleon for other teams and other use cases. 

We were pleased to see that the pricing is based on monthly active users and that there's a lot of flexibility and room for growth. This allowed us to use Chameleon with one of our applications and then expand our usage to another application within our licensing band, which was really helpful.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

Chameleon was first installed on AvidXChange’s software tool called AvidSuite. Now, they have Chameleon installed on another tool called AvidStrongroom, and they’re about to install it on a third tool that supports their supplier customer base. 

Our partnership with Chameleon is growing. We continuously see more and more opportunities to use it because it truly enhances user experience, and helps us with customer training and handling different issues that may arise in our various products.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

Here’s an example of a personalized Tour that AvidXhange built with Chameleon to onboard users with the right messages at the right time. 

Ticket deflection was only the beginning

Aside from Customer Education, AvidXchange’s Marketing team also brought Chameleon into their toolkit – to inform customers about upcoming user conferences and other relevant webinars.

We used to invite customers to join our webinars via email, and we’d get around 90 to 130 signups. From the moment we started showing in-app invitations built with Chameleon, the number of registrants tripled.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

Reaching a wider audience and getting more commitment from them to attend educational events indirectly turned into cases deflected because more and more customers have been educated on something that they could’ve potentially created a case on. 

It showed how much more effective in-app messaging is, compared to email.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

Since the AvidXchange Community was launched in August 2021, Chameleon has once again proven to be a powerful tool for feature adoption. This community is a customers’ hub with case information, product guides, instructional videos, discussion forums, chat, and the entire knowledge base. So the team started using Chameleon to help announce it and invite customers to join.

Chameleon has helped us raise awareness of our new community. At first, we were informing customers that it was live. Then, we targeted only users that haven’t joined yet, and explained the benefits in a different format to encourage them.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

For the re-invites, AvidXchange created a Tour with a short video, followed by a text-based message and a CTA button, so they were able to track completion rate and dismissals.

The fact that Chameleon allows us to add basically any media type was critical to success. We were able to improve the UX and drive more traffic to our community.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

What’s next for AvidXchange?

When Josh started building the Customer Education team, his mission was to scale business operations through technology and innovation. Discovering Chameleon and using it to communicate with customers in the app, get the data behind CTA interactions, and act upon the insights to improve customer experience has helped AvidXchange to scale and grow. 

Right now, we have Chameleon installed in what we call AvidSuite. It includes AvidBuy, AvidInvoice, and AvidPay software modules. From there, we've now installed it into AvidStrongroom, which is a completely different system. Plus, we have it scheduled to be installed in the system for our supplier base.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

AvidXchange’s Chameleon usage grew from three modules to three more – a 100% growth in terms of how many AvidXchange applications are using it. And, as Josh Suess concludes, there's still potential for more tools from the AvidXchange application pool to leverage Chameleon.

Overall, Chameleon has paid itself multiple times over.

Josh Suess, Senior Director of Digital Service Strategy

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