On CRM: Website Builder Wix Launches A CRM App To Solve A Common Problem

(This post originally appeared on Forbes)

As a CRM consultant, I’m always recommending ways our clients can make better use of the systems we implement – and hopefully use us to help them.  One of my go-to recommendations is website integration. Most good CRM systems can be integrated with a company’s website to bring down user information so that their behavior can be tracked and communications can be tailored to their preferences. Unfortunately, not many small businesses do this, thinking it’s too costly or time consuming.

They’re wrong. It’s not costly and it doesn’t have to be time consuming. So here’s another idea: instead of integrating a CRM system with a website why not create a website that already has these integrations built-in?  That’s the idea behind Wix’s new suite of products called Ascend.

Last week the company – which is famously known for providing tools that help small businesses build websites and now serves more than 110 million users in 190 countries – launched the new suite of twenty products (some of which already existed) to help small businesses do their marketing directly from their Wix-developed website.

According to a company press release, the new suite of products aims to help customers promote their sites, manage interactions across channels,  automatically respond to online queries, better utilize an array of intuitive SEO tools, create unique content to engage customers through social media channels and leverage other marketing and CRM capabilities.

“It’s not only about building a website, but actually helping to make it into a very effective business,” Nitzan Achsaf, Wix’s VP and General Manager of Customer Experience told PC Mag. “It’s goal is to help [companies] be more successful in managing the communication and managing the leads, and understanding how to convert visitors to leads, from leads to customers, from customers to returning customers, as well as how to get more traffic and how to be successful online.”

Ascend will leverage the information gathered from users as they visit a Wix-developed site and allow a company to use that data to better nurture that prospect. For example, automatic messaging such as thank you and welcome notes can be configured as the well as the ability to automatically send out an invitation, quote or proposal which can then be discussed and negotiated via website chat.

“Instead of you needing to be an expert when it comes to sales and marketing, you have CRM, marketing tools, and financial tools, all in one place that talk to you in an intuitive way,” Achsaf said. “So basically Ascend suggests to you what to do. Instead of you needing to go through different channels, you can do it in one place.”

The platform also contains an all-in-one dashboard for monitoring outreach, search engine optimization, email marketing and social media activities as well as the ability to create workflows, take notes and log in reminders.

“We have packaged these products within Ascend to be comprehensive, automated, and seamlessly engineered directly from the Wix platform,” Wix.com chief executive Avishai Abrahami said in a ZDNet interview.

Wix’s reverse-engineering of CRM makes sense. Just consider the numbers.

There are more small businesses with websites than CRM systems and if the process for marrying the two was easier than it’s reasonable to assume that more small businesses could better leverage the capabilities of both. Knowing my client base of small businesses, however, I’m not so sure that the typical Wix customer will fully utilize all that’s available. But to me, that’s a great opportunity for not only CRM consultants but now web developers to help their clients fully take advantage of these tools.