$27 billion of venture funding went into the web3 ecosystem last year. The industry is growing rapidly, but much more work needs to be done to get the next billion people onto web3.

Today, user experience still sucks, and when you have a problem or want to get started but aren’t sure how, there is no one to help you along the way.

Over the past month, we’ve spoken to over one hundred community managers, customer support managers and founders in web3. Read on to learn about all the pain points they’re facing in their day-to-day work and how Mava plans to solve these.

The Problems

Users and teams are overwhelmed

Busy servers get hundreds of messages per day, which are a mix of questions, casual chat and spam. Moderators are often stressed, overwhelmed, or burned out. What’s more, for those whose full-time job isn’t keeping an eye on Discord, its busy and chaotic nature isn’t conducive to productivity.

“Discord prevents you from doing actual work.” DAO Manager

For users, keeping track of Discord is a full-time job; most users don’t check more than a handful of servers. When it comes to support, the typical experience is entering a crowded Discord, leaving a message and waiting for a community member or mod to answer you. As you leave the server and come back a day or two later, you might have difficulty finding your message amongst the endless stream of “GMs”.

Or, if you’re lucky, the server might use a Discord ticketing system. This is better, but if you don’t keep checking on a response, because of Discord’s channel limit, the server moderators might have closed your ticket, which typically means deleting the ticket - never to be found again!

"Discord is horrible. It was built for gamers to communicate with each other; it wasn't created to serve as a channel for web3 or customer support." Web3 User

Users are constant targets for scammers

Security is one of the most common topics in conversations with community and customer support managers. It’s on top of everyone’s mind. Users get targeted with phishing emails, fake Twitter and Discord support accounts as well as DMs; resulting in users losing trust, or worse, significant amounts of money. Some companies have taken the stance to minimize support channels, but if users can’t find an easy or obvious way to reach support, the chance they’ll fall for unofficial reps only increases.

Only the paranoid survive. We have to be so careful, it takes away from being able to deliver a great customer experience.” NFT Project Lead

For teams, support doesn’t scale

It’s natural for teams to want to be where their users are, which is often Discord and Telegram within web3. However, since these platforms were built for casual chats and not for support, they lack the powerful features of purpose-made support software. The most important missing elements include:

Automations

Most people we spoke to said that 50-75% of the questions they receive are standard and easy to answer. For example, projects targeting newcomers often get questions like “how do I set up a wallet?”. These questions could easily be answered by suggesting an FAQ answer or using conversational AI. Other more basic automations include categorizing tickets and automatically directing them to the right person or team. Most of this isn’t possible when using Discord, Twitter, or Telegram for support and makes moderators waste huge amounts of time on repetitive tasks.

Insights & Analytics

Questions that most support managers need to be able to answer to be efficient and scale their support include: How many tickets are coming in? How much staff do I need at what time? How are people performing?

Founders and product managers might be interested to know the most common issues their community faces or the most common feature requests. None of these insights can be easily obtained when chatting to users in Discord or Telegram.

“Telegram and Discord are fine for early stages, but as you scale, it's truly impossible to offer support on these platforms. There’s no way to measure how many requests are coming in or the [nature] of those requests. It’s super valuable to understand what issues are popping up across the board so those departments can identify those issues and fix them quickly. It’s also impossible to measure the support team's [quality] and assign goals or even develop them without metrics." Customer Support Manager at Crypto Company

Support and communication aren't relevant or personalized

Excellent customer support is a powerful tool to activate and retain users.

It helps if you know what type of user you’re speaking with. Someone new to crypto will likely need totally different information to be convinced to try out a product vs. a crypto whale. Outbound communication isn’t personalized either, if it even happens at all. Users get bombarded with announcements and messages that aren’t relevant to them, resulting in simply ignoring most messages. The worst case is when a message is very important - say a crucial security update - and projects are left without the ability to contact their users.

“At the moment, I have no idea whether the “fuzzy cat” I am speaking to is a CEO or a random degen.” - Web3 Community Manager

Mava’s Solution

A secure and powerful platform to support users, wherever they are

We’re building a next generation customer support platform, to help organizations seamlessly support their community across multiple channels from one powerful, secure dashboard.

As a first step, our tool will connect to popular channels such as Discord, Telegram, Twitter and web chat so teams can manage, respond and track all incoming queries from one place.

Workflow Optimizations and Automations

Aggregating all channels will automatically lead to productivity gains, but there's more. Mava will have all the basic features you’d expect from a support tool, such as assigning agents, statuses and categories and the ability to filter. Customize and automate responses based on the type of inquiry users have, as well as making sure it reaches the right person.

When it comes to customer support, automation will always be a work in progress.  The end goal would be to automate all responses to basic queries so that organizations can focus on scaling, and not waste time on mundane activities. What’s more, a good support system will help product teams understand common issues and enable them to make the product so intuitive that most questions don’t need to be asked in the first place.

On-Chain Activity and Wallet Insights

Mava wants to enable teams to better understand their users by displaying key on-chain data and transaction history right from the Mava support dashboard. This allows the support team to quickly confirm transactions in order to resolve issues quickly and efficiently. It also allows for routing users to the right person, for example, based on the product they’ve interacted with or how experienced they are with crypto.

New Opportunities

Web3-Native Communication Channels

Connect with users via interacting with their wallet. We plan to let users opt-in for wallet notifications, so that project teams can update users with important updates and users receive notifications when their support request has been answered.

Using the power of community

One element of web3 that we’re super excited about bringing into Mava is the power of community. Communities play a pivotal role in most project’s support operations, with members often helping each other out. We want to take this one step further and enable organizations to use community support in a more organized and moderated way. The vision is to recognize top contributors and reward them for participating in support efforts, creating a win-win-win for end-users, contributors and the organization alike.

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