India is another country where we do have people on the ground and the partner network is extraordinary. But if we think about South America, we think about other regions for the time being, while we’re focused on efficient growth, yes, it will be partner led in these new markets rather than BigCommerce people led.
Operator: The next question will come from Mark Murphy with JPMorgan.
Mark Murphy: Brent, you mentioned using AI based chatbots for customer support in your prepared comments. I’m just curious at a high level, is any of the positive margin progress that you’ve had so far at this point attributable to efficiency gains or productivity gains that are stemming from that kind of internal usage of Gen AI products, whether it be GitHub Copilot or customer support chatbots or anything else? Or would you look at it and say that all of this was kind of 100% unrelated to AI? And then I have a quick follow-up.
Brent Bellm: I’m not going to say it rises to the level of major financial significance. But what I would emphasize is on the customer experience side, two things. Number one is unlike one of our biggest competitors, we provide big commerce human support ourselves with live phone numbers for all customers globally. And we’re able to do that at an efficient level, partly because we’re very operationally disciplined. Many of our Tier 1 support personnel are now down in Mexico, which we’ve had real success hiring in. And on top of that, the chatbot option enables many customers to come in, ask a question, get it answered and never even need to talk to a live human being. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m very proud of the like only I think it was 8 or 18 second wait time on average for enterprise customers during peak holiday volumes, that’s pretty outstanding to get such fast and excellent customer service, while we’re delivering ever improving gross margins.
So it is helping there, but I think the benefits are even bigger on the customer experience and customer success side than they are on the financial side.
Daniel Lentz: Yes. Let me add one point to that before you ask your follow-up question as well. I think that I really see it as a productivity boost more so than it is a cost-cutting thing in the short run. I think that the fact that so many customers are able to get the answers in that example. The fact that they’re able to get their questions answered that quickly is just really a good thing. And to Brent’s point, from a cost structure perspective, that enables us to continue to have really, really efficient cost effective support. As Brent mentioned, we’re hiring folks in diverse locations. We have some folks that we’re hiring in Mexico. We have other folks that we’re hiring in the United States and continue to do so. We’re not looking to outsource or geographically move where our support is sitting.
We’re wanting that to be mixed. We really also see and I think this is something that’s really not really always widely understood about BigCommerce is that the folks that we have in tech support, internally we called in ninjas because they are down the front-line kind of taking care of our customers and that’s also an amazing pipeline development that we have for future engineers as a career development path for us and that’s something that’s kind of continue be a really big priority for us. So while it’s great that it’s differentiating the level of service and support that our customers get. Having such great investment on those resources internally in multiple different geographies is also great from a talent management and development point of view for us as well.
Brent Bellm: Yes. I’d add Ireland as our other location for European language support.
Mark Murphy: Yes, I think it was 13 seconds on the wait time. But I mean, whether it was 8 or 13 or 18, it seems like you’re having great success. I just wanted to ask you if you kind of extend this thought where you have the partnership with Google, you have access to all of Google’s AI technology for the product description, the customer recommendations, understanding the intent of search terms, etcetera. Do you think that that can create some sustainable differentiation? Like in other words, are you getting earlier access to Google products? Are you getting more help from Google to kind of infuse all that into your own products?
Brent Bellm: We absolutely are. They’re very closely partnered with us and think of us as a lead partner for everything they’re doing in AI as it relates to e-commerce. I would also note that our approach is differentiated from our multiple of our competitors because it’s not proprietary. I would point to all of Shopify, Salesforce and Adobe, as focusing on proprietary branded AI, whereas BigCommerce is being open and best of breed led. We’ll work with Google’s best AI, we’ll work with any other AI ChatGPT engines, we’ll both do proprietary AI products, but will also heavily bring our ecosystem partners, our tech partners, our agency partners actually to the hackathons and the development sessions with Google and other AI partners.
And I think that open approach, it might have been the case two years ago, where the best AI was being done by the giant global software conglomerates. But that’s not the case anymore, right? It’s been democratized by Google, by OpenAI and Microsoft, by Facebook. And I think our open approach is going to lead to more and better AI options for our ecosystem than the proprietary approaches of the three competitors I named.
Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Brent Bellm, CEO and Chairman for any closing remarks. Please go ahead, sir.
Brent Bellm : Great. As we go into 2024, two summary messages from us. The first is customer focus and customer success. We are absolutely truly committed to bringing the world’s best e-commerce product and service to our customers and our ecosystem, whether it’s enterprise B2B and B2C product, the world’s best omnichannel capabilities, multi geography and international selling capabilities or composable. We’re focused on the best product and service for our customers in the world. Second main point is about efficient growth. We showed in 2023 that we can in a short timeframe, turn our business into a highly profitable, highly cash flow generating business with good macro and micro unit economics. Now that those are in place, the story for 2024 is efficient growth, where we would really like to demonstrate an ability to kind of bend the growth curve and get top-line growth back to strong levels, but with extraordinarily good macro and micro unit economics that are now in place.
And so thanks for everybody who is following us or joining us on this journey, and we look forward to talking again next quarter. Thanks.
Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.
