South Africa’s largest online retailer and marketplace, Takealot.com, uses Whatfix to train new sellers on their Seller solutions platform. Takealot has successfully automated self-training for 30% of their sellers by leveraging Whatfix widgets effectively.
Takealot.com is South Africa’s largest online retailer with listed products across all major categories like Electronics, Entertainment, Fashion, Liquor, etc. Takealot’s marketplace model serves thousands of buyers and sellers across the African continent.
Takelot.com’s Seller solutions is a win-win situation for both the company and the sellers. It allows third party sellers across Africa to offer their products under their name for sale on Takealot. The services that Takealot has built include storage, fulfillment, payments, customer service and returns management.
“About 30% of the sellers on our platform go through onboarding and training using Whatfix alone. This number will surely increase as we leverage the service more and push Whatfix’s self-service this year!”
Challenges Faced By Takealot.Com
As South Africa’s fastest growing online retailer, Takealot has steadfastly captured the e-commerce opportunity in the region.
Latching on to the growing e-commerce industry in Africa and creating an unparalleled customer-centric online shopping experience – an above par marketplace became the strategic goal for the company. With sellers from across the continent registering on the platform, onboarding, and training them efficiently became the key to their success.
But, there was a catch. Despite the self-explanatory interface of the platform, the number of support queries escalated proportionally with the number of new sellers. Looking for ideas to defuse the situation, they decided to explore applications that could self-serve the sellers on specific touch points. The expectation was that by implementing such an application, the sellers would be empowered to train themselves and find answers to their problems directly, without reaching out to the Takealot support team.
To address this need, they started looking for solutions that could help the sellers self-serve.
Why Takealot.Com Chose Whatfix
When Takealot.com discovered Whatfix, they were thoroughly impressed by Whatfix’s ease of use and capability to quickly create and automate self-service, interactive walkthroughs. This aspect of Whatfix solved a critical pain point for Takealot, as their seller solutions underwent constant interface changes. Ultimately, the main challenge was to train both new and existing sellers as and when required.
Whatfix interactive guides could virtually handhold sellers through all major touch points on the platform, with little or no support from executives.
As soon as they started with Whatfix, Takealot began creating walkthroughs for all commonly asked questions that consumed support executives’ time. They began by sharing the URL of the interactive walkthroughs over chats and emails to help new sellers in real-time. This was followed by integrating Whatfix’s Self Help widget, which improved their existing training mechanism, allowing sellers to self-serve quickly and easily, at the time of need.
Now, after consistently using Whatfix for more than a year, about 30% of the sellers on Takealot’s Seller solutions are trained via the interactive walkthroughs alone. This has resulted in about 12% reduction of their overall support costs.
The smooth sailing with Whatfix has motivated the team to implement multiple product adoption widgets with Whatfix that help to further streamline the onboarding, seller engagement, and training on the platform.
“I would highly recommend Whatfix to other companies. I am very excited to leverage the task list and the onboarding tour feature to guide new sellers, especially as they can be easily overwhelmed by an overload of information if given all at once.”
