In 2015 Ala Ibrahim took a student job as a Wix Customer Care Expert. Now He’s a Product Support Team Lead in charge of analyzing the ways users interact with some of Wix’s most important products

When Ala Ibrahim started to think about finding his first job as a grownup, he didn’t imagine that the long hours of playing video games as a kid would pay off.

Ala arrived in the big city of Tel Aviv from a remote village in northern Israel right after graduating high school about 8 years ago, and he braced himself for difficult times. “At home we spoke Arabic and my Hebrew wasn't good enough back then. Not only that I started studying software engineering because I didn’t really understand that it wasn’t about design,” he smiles, “but I felt that I couldn’t get a job and support myself because of the language barrier. I counted on scholarships to make ends meet, but after about a year of school, a friend who worked at Wix told me that since the company was working mainly in English and since my English was very good because of all the hours I’ve spent playing games and talking with other gamers online - I should give it a try”.

Ala did, and in September 2015 he began a part-time student job at Wix as a Customer Care Expert. Our Experts are the ones who are in touch with our users over phone, chat and email and those who help them with our many products. Since they’re expected to know pretty much everything about them - from how to walk a user through the process of setting up a billing system for their online business to changing the templates they’re using on it - they need to have a deep understanding of them.

Ala says that while his professional life at Wix was going great (“sometimes I would even work extra hours just because I loved it”), during his third year of college he realized that software engineering wasn't for him and shifted to a full time job at Wix.

After 2 months of working full-time, he was offered to join a Product Support team for Wix’s Email Marketing product and later on got his own team and an analysis project. “I scanned thousands of tickets to understand the scenarios in which users would get stuck doing something. It enabled the department to develop a new product that dealt with that issue and reduced the number of such tickets by 96 percent,” he explains. “I got a lot of praise for it and it made me realize that I’m good at what I do and that I really enjoy it,” he says.

In 2018 Ala was promoted to Product Support Lead and was in charge of 12 people who worked on analysis projects. “Our job was to collect data from users about all of our features and all of the products that we manage and build a presentation with wireframes and mockups to explain the issue and then offer solutions based on our deep understanding of our users and the way they interact with Wix. Afterwards, Product Managers would create it,” he says.

Ala’s teams’ insights proved to be valuable assets for Product Managers and for our Customer Care group, and in December 2020, after 2 years in the role, Ala was given more products to work on and now directly managed a team of 4 people. In October 2021, after only 10 months, he was offered to take the Wix Editor Product Support Team Lead role.

“What that means is that my team was doubled so I now have a team of 8 people that are from Tel Aviv, Dublin, Kiev, Miami and San Francisco. I’m responsible for Editor, Mobile Editor, Accessibility, Performance and Components. We update knowledge base articles based on our insights, we let users know about new features that can help them so we partner with Product Managers to build training material for all of our Experts. Right now, anything that has to do with Customer Care for our new Editor product is my responsibility.”

"At Wix, there’s a feeling of being cared about and appreciated and that makes you want to give more”

Ala says that he thanks his managers for his rapid growth. “All my managers pushed me to bigger roles. I also understood that Customer Care at Wix is different than it is in other places. At Wix we don’t just answer users. We’re a lot more than that because we work with UX and Accessibility to find better solutions for users’ frustrations; We work with our Knowledge Base organization to create better knowledge centers for users; We work with Product Managers. When they introduce a new feature they always give it to us first so we can play with it and help out with quality assurance. Basically we influence the look, feel and functionality of the products, and that’s fun”.

What’s your personal recipe for growth at Wix?

“First of all you need to love what you do. To be super creative and not be afraid to share your opinions and ideas. I’ve been at Wix for 7 years and not a day goes by where I’m bored or I don’t like what I’m doing and it’s because of my managers and the people that I work with. There’s a feeling of being cared about and appreciated and that makes you want to give more”.

Explore all Customer Care roles at Wix.