I think we're ready to go. The last thing is.
Recording in progress.
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Text Group Webinar concerning KPIs for the fourth quarter of the financial year, that is, the period of January to March 2024. I'm Łucja Kaseja, manager at Investor Relations at Text, and here with me is also Marcin Droba, the head of IR, at Text. Today it will be our pleasure, firstly mine and later on also, of Marcin to discuss the recent KPIs. So, let's start. The vision and mission for Text remains the same as it's been for a year now, so text intelligence for better customer service. We're also happy to share with you that, next Thursday it will be 10 years of Text, previously LiveChat as publicly listed company. We are very grateful to those investors who have been with us for the last 10 years because we have some investors like that.
We will take a very short moment to actually summarize those 10 years because we're quite proud of what we've managed to do as a listed company. So we started in 2014, when there was the IPO of the company with 7,600 clients, of them just LiveChat product. Now, 10 years later we have almost six times more customers, so actually almost 43,000 subscriptions of four paid products: LiveChat, ChatBot, HelpDesk, and KnowledgeBase. Our annual recurring revenues at the time were $6.2 million, which is less than we actually have MRR now. In those 10 years we managed to increase those by more than 12 times. I think we were also very good at growing our earnings per share because CAGR of EPS was 37.5% over that period. We also were very consistent in paying dividends, which actually outgrew the IPO price.
We did not raise the capital at the time of the IPO, but with the IPO share price at the time of the offering was PLN 18.60, and the dividends that we have paid out were over PLN 25. So the dividend per share was actually covered well the initial share price. Once again, thank you to those investors who had been with us for those years. That was the past. I think we will now discuss the present, and hopefully in the discussions after the presentation we will be also able to discuss the future of the company.
Just let me say that I was there at the debut. I remember that day. So of course on a personal level it's also a very important anniversary for me because, you know, I remember that day and was at the Warsaw Stock Exchange at the event of the debut. So happy to be there and happy to be here now.
As always, we start with a very brief discussion of what we—who we are. So we are a global SaaS software as a service business. We sell the products in form of subscriptions, with our main market being United States. We have a very unique customer acquisition model. We still have the co-founders present at the company level. And we also are a dividend-paying company with, as I already mentioned, a very good track record of those. I won't go into the products in specific because hopefully more or less all of you know LiveChat, ChatBot, HelpDesk, and KnowledgeBase, but I will be happy to discuss the KPIs for Q4 of our financial year. So the very first metric that I'm going to discuss is monthly recurring revenues. So those actually stood at $6.66 million at the end of March.
It is actually the good result that it is. It's the result of optimizing the structure of our product price lists and the use of products by our clients. I'm going to discuss that further, but actually this is the quarter where we had a growth. It was 2.6% year-on-year. No, sorry. 2.6% quarter-on-quarter growth and 4.1% year-on-year growth, which are a good indication of where we want to go this year.
Because, of course, it's not like our target, definitely not, but definitely better that we saw in the last quarter.
The second slide we're going to discuss is actually the payments received. And as you see, this was again a record quarter in terms of the payments. They exceeded $21 million, were actually quite close to $22 million US dollars. And what is important to mention here is actually that HelpDesk this quarter has been very strong in terms of the growth. As you can see, on the slide, you can actually see the green color on the graph. In case of customers, here we have quite long perspective because this is for the past three years, this number of customers. Actually, you cannot really see that strong what had been happening in January, February, or March this year. But important things took place actually at the end of the year.
We started to optimize the price lists, and so we did a couple of things aimed at the way the customers use or the way they use our terms of usage of the product. Those started to operate at the end of 2023 and early January of this year. The immediate effect, as you can, I hope, see on this graph, is actually that the number of customers went down. That is because we targeted the customers who were using the product not properly, overusing. However, if you look at more or less the line for the quarter, it is quite stable because actually quarter-over-quarter there was -9 customers.
This quite unfortunate event is that the end of the month was actually the weekend and the Easter break because usually the way it works with our customers is that we have more sub more churn during the weekend. So actually if it was Monday or Tuesday, we might have seen a positive number in terms of the customers on quarterly basis. But still, if you just look on the March data, on this number of customers that we managed to add in March, this is +72 customers. So it's actually quite promising. Then the second KPI for LiveChat product is ARPU. And here again, you can see the history of ARPU for the last couple of years, but something important took place again at the end of the year. You can see that there was a sharp increase in ARPU in January.
This is exactly the time when we started to, or actually the end of December was the start, but the effect was mainly in January. This is when we started to optimize the pricing list and we imposed some limits on the activity of the customers in terms of the number of sessions or number of chats they could have had at the same time. And the direct result of those actions is increase in ARPU. Such changes to the pricing list and to also meant that we lost some of the customers. So the churn, the customer churn, increased. And you can see these numbers or this data when you look at the number of customers. But at the same time, there's a third component and that was improved. So net MRR churn, which at the beginning of the year was a, was improved.
So actually those changes that we did to the pricing list, to those limits that we imposed on the customers, they have worked, all in all in a positive direction because ARPU was higher now at the level of $160, but also it meant some more churn in terms of the number of customers. We will be continuing such activities, such optimization into the year. So there will be; we hopefully will see again an effect, a positive effect on ARPU, but also there will be some cost of that, so increased churn. In terms of the same data for ChatBot, for the number of customers of ChatBot product, it was a difficult quarter. Maybe we could even call it a little bit disappointing because we actually, well, the level was almost stable. We lost, on a net level, two customers.
But what is important, we were very product-focused in terms of ChatBot. So there were quite a few new things added to ChatBot. We were less focused on customer acquisition, but hopefully, especially that we plan to link more LiveChat products with ChatBot, it will bring new customers to ChatBot. Although the number of customers was slightly disappointing, ARPU of ChatBot product is still growing. So the new customers that we add to the product, they actually support ARPU. And even this added another $2 during the quarter. Also together, and we've always were saying that without maybe indicating special, like specific numbers, when you think about ChatBot, there is actually a subscription part. So this is ARPU that we see, but also there is an additional part that the customers might pay.
If you exceed the number of interactions that are in a specific plan, you have to pay additionally per each specific, per each, chat. We have increased the pricing of that. It used to be $0.01 and it's still $0.01 for the old customers. But now, for the new customers of ChatBot, each interaction that is over the limit that is imposed in a specific plan costs $0.03. What it essentially means is that on top of the part, the recurring revenue that we're getting from ChatBot, there is also an additional part of the revenues. These are the revenues that we get from those additional chats. If those additional chats were added to this ARPU that we have on the slide, that would give usually another $30 to ARPU.
We cannot actually show it together because these payments for additional chats, they are not really recurring because they depend on the usage. But if you added that be the another $30 and after the price increase that we had in March, those additional chats would bring another $40 to ChatBot's ARPU. So it actually shows you that, unlike with LiveChat where we update those prices, well, optimize those price lists, here we increase the price for additional chats. Here we have the data for HelpDesk. We started to show HelpDesk, I think, two quarters ago, and it is actually proved to be a very good product to describe because this quarter, it was the best growing product.
First of all, you can see that, on a net level, we added 42 customers in the quarter, so it was growing very nicely. Also, HelpDesk is part of the affiliate program for over a year now, but finally, we get this source of new customers working very well. There will be also increased potential from HelpDesk because actually it will be joined together with a KnowledgeBase. It will. KnowledgeBase will stop being a separate product. It will be combined with HelpDesk, and it should actually bring more value for HelpDesk, also marketing value. So, it will help us to further increase ARPU of this product. And it is also a slightly different product in terms of the usage because it has actually an excellent product retention.
So, with that, the essence of HelpDesk is that many people work on tickets on the issues within the product. And it's nice; it is actually nice to add new users of HelpDesk. And it actually, for us as a SaaS business, it means that the retention of this product is very, very good. Also, you can see that on the level of ARPU because the growth of ARPU is very well, and there in the last months of this financial year, so actually for January to March, this product had negative MRR churn. So, the retention of clients was superb. And that meant that only in March this year, we added more than $3 to ARPU, despite the fact that the initial payments for HelpDesk product in the beginning of the year were very low.
So, on the level of $50, but still the product managed to grow very well. And in this product, the retention is key. We have discussed the KPIs of different products. Now we will more discuss the product, maybe not roadmap, but the most recent events that we had within the products. So the first one goes for LiveChat. We have now one, the new AI assistant. And this is the companion that helps navigating all agents using LiveChat. So at the very first moment when you open the LiveChat product, the first chat that you see is actually the AI assistant that allows you to ask questions, ask, you can ask this AI assistant about your own activity, the number of chats you had, or you can ask about the product.
And this is something that we really wanted to show our customers because over the last one and a half years, we've made a lot of new features, a lot of, we've invested a lot in AI. But one thing that was not going so well was actually showing the value to the customers. We saw that many of the customers were reluctant to use AI and some of them even requested AI to be turned off. So in order to be able to show actually the value in our product development in AI solutions, we now display AI assistant, the one, right in front of the customer. Also, after using our chatbot, the chatbot product, for the last four months, we can share with you the results that are achieved with our own chatbot.
So when you enter LiveChat.com website, the very first conversation that you have is with our chatbot. And it is ChatBot that, I mean, the product, the ChatBot product. So for those four months, AI bot had 400,000 conversations on its own. So that meant without any human agents. And that is 80% of all chats that our customers had on our website. This amount of conversations means that if it was not the chatbot, we would need an equivalent work of 100 full-time agents handling those chats. So that shows that by having this chatbot on our website, that is equivalent of savings from those 100 full-time agents of $3.6 million.
So, to show you, like, to be precise here, if we didn't have any AI, any bot in place on our website, we would need many, many more agents. Having this chatbot on our websites allows us to have so many conversations. And what is also important, our chatbot is on par with human agents, with our consultants in terms of the customer satisfaction. So, the bot maintains 95% of positive customer satisfaction. And this data is based on our own usage of our own products on the website. However, we think that the more you work on the bots, you can actually improve those numbers. So, this is something that we are very proud to have. But one thing to be said as well is the fact that it doesn't exclude, it doesn't mean that we want to exclude agents.
In our case, the most skilled customer support people are now helping with developing more complex solutions for our customers to be able to serve them better into the future. And now, the highlights of the quarter, and after that we'll go into the questions. So for the quarter, we had an MRR growth of 2.6%, compared to the previous quarter and 4% year-over-year. So we entered actually the calendar year with growth in terms of the MRR. Also, we had record and in terms of the value of the payments received in the quarter, that was an increase of 8.6% over the last year. And it is important to say that our sales team had quite good quarter and some successful customers.
We have not shared in our presentations these numbers, but a little thing to be proud of, maybe as a kind of a starter, we have now 59 customers paying for all four products. And 10 of them were added during the fourth quarter. In terms of the product, we started the year with the roadmap of optimization for all of the products. So with LiveChat, these are the actions to optimize the price lists, and the usage of the product by the customers. And this quarter, it's translated into growth of ARPU, but also meant that the customer churn was higher during the quarter. But we also have a roadmap for further optimization activities in the following quarters. And that means, for example, removing the legacy plans that we had in place for LiveChat product.
In LiveChat, we also have this AI assistant one implemented, and it is to show the customers the value of AI in the product. In ChatBot, we are very much focused on the product side, but we also made some price updates so that there is this increased price for additional chats for the new customers. To be able to show a better value of HelpDesk product, which is anyway doing very well, it will be merged with KnowledgeBase. For us, it will, it means it will have a better marketing potential as a combined product. We are also continuing works on new products and revenue streams, and hopefully we will be able to show some numbers with the presentation of the next quarter KPIs. And that's all on my side this time. We're happy to answer any questions that you have.
We have, I think one question for now.
Hopefully.
So let's start. Of course, you can raise your hand if you want to ask some questions. If not, please write some questions for us. But okay, we have the first brave one. Thank you, Łucja. We start with this written question from Jose Ignacio Carro.
Good afternoon. Thanks for the presentation and the congratulations for these excellent KPIs. Thank you. Thank you. You're very kind. Is there an update with the possibility of share buybacks? The current valuation of the stock is very cheap, and buybacks at this moment would create value for the long-term investors.
So thank you for that question. I mean, we received actually during last quarter a lot of, you know, voices like that about buyback.
And we have this discussion. So we have internal discussion on the buyback right now at the moment. Of course, we have dividend policy at place. We started to gather some feedback from investors from different groups and investors, and the feedback is mixed. I mean, the feedback is mixed. I think rather foreign investors are in favor of some buyback. And we can see reasons behind that voices because, you know, definitely the share price is, you know, where it is. So of course reasonable. At the same time, some long-term investors who are with us for these 10 years even, like, Polish funds are rather not in favor of that. So no decision yet, no decision made. We have this discussion.
If you have some additional points you would like to make, we are open to hear that. For now, we no decision made. Just discussion on that point. But thank you. Thank you for raising the topic. And maybe we let Łucja ask questions. So, okay, hello,. . You can ask your question now.
Hi. Thank you, Marcin. Hi. And hi, Łucja. Hi.
Hi.
I have a question regarding the chatbot. And please correct me if I'm wrong. So you said that around $40 came from the interactions which were above the limit. So is it correct to think that around like 30%?
So if we add that to the ARPU, the current ARPU of chatbot is 134 + like 40 gives you 174, which means that around 30% of the revenues of chatbot came from that, interactions above the usage limit. Is that correct?
For March. For March, it is correct. It used to be in the previous months, it was rather 30%. It was rather 30%. I mean, March was very good in terms of the usage. And we have some new customers who are on the new prices. So yes, that March was extremely good, was record high. But yes, it's like $40 additional dollars in March would be added to RPU. Mm-hmm.
Okay. Thank you.
How much would you say that number has been on average in the past? Like, in terms of like, more close to 30 or more close to 40?
30.
30.
It was around 30.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. So on average, in a quarter, we were receiving below 30, $300,000 from those additional chats. And on in terms of ARPU, that meant on average $30 additionally.
Okay. Okay. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. And can I ask another question? Yes, of course. Okay. So I mean, can you please, you know, tell us what's the outlook look like for HelpDesk, right? I mean, you're now going to be merging that with HelpDesk. And so how do you see like that product in five years? Thank you.
I mean, it is quite difficult for us to see where the product will be in five years' time. However, we were always saying that HelpDesk market is actually much bigger in terms of the size than LiveChat or ChatBot. So definitely the market is huge, and the potential is there, but we also have very well-positioned already other players. So it will be difficult to take the first place. However, one thing about HelpDesk is actually that it is much more sticky for the customers because once you use it for your organization, it first of all usually requires more agents. And then once you have that system installed at your company, you stay with the product much longer. So it's slightly different to, for example, LiveChat.
So sorry for not being more, I mean, maybe exact when it comes to forecast, but you know, very long perspective now is now something very difficult for us to really make responsibly. But we were, I mean, even now looking at the HelpDesk is doing very good. I mean, definitely we'd like and we really hope that we'd be able to grow faster. But even looking at revenue retention, I mean, that's the absolutely perfect situation for the SaaS product when you have a negative and ephemeral churn. That's something you really would want to achieve. That would be perfect to have such a result on permanent basis with for the LiveChat. I mean, HelpDesk is not so easy to embrace.
It's not so easy to onboard that LiveChat advantage. But when you get HelpDesk, when you start to work with HelpDesk, you really, it's really sticky for you. So very excited. Market is huge. So we're very optimistic when it comes to HelpDesk.
Okay. Got you. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And we have some next written question, a question from Mr. Arnaud Wenninck. How is LiveChat performing versus the market and versus competitors?
That's a very broad question.
Yeah. So what maybe we thought, what we can track easily in terms of market performance of the LiveChat is the share in the, when you look at the number of the LiveChats installed on some website. So it's not exactly the full market.
And definitely, it's not about the market share in terms of the revenue. But it's about how many websites are using each LiveChat technology. But it's not the perfect picture, but it's easy to track. So actually it's something which is easy to see. And we can see that although there is a lot of new entrants, a lot of changes, our actually our shares for some years is very, I would say very constant. Our market share is like 6%-7%, which gives us some number five position. But saying that, the most popular are three solutions, very simple solutions which actually are offered for free. The most popular is solution called talk to.
The next is Facebook Messenger website plugin, which allows you to use Messenger as on your website. And the number one among the premium providers is Zendesk, so Zendesk Chat. So it's very stable. It's a very strong position if you look at the premium providers. And which is very important when you think about LiveChat versus free solution. We really are not perceiving them as a competitor in that sense that we really don't think they're getting some customers from us. But it happens. But it's usual the situation when some our customers don't have chats.
If they don't have a lot of chats, they may like this to have that opportunity to have that kind of solution, but they don't want and they don't need to pay for solutions like that. But what they're doing for us, especially Facebook, is they actually bring some customers to our space. And at some point, we are able to monetize these customers. Also, Facebook Messenger is also a communication channel for the chatbot. So actually, if you look at the chatbot customer base, more than 60% of the chatbot users are using chatbot integrated with LiveChat. But some 30% are using LiveChat, our chatbot, a chatbot solution integrated with Facebook Messenger.
So, for us, it's good to have them around actually.
And the next question we have from Radim Kramule. Good afternoon. Are you planning to expand regionally into new geographies in order to start growing number of clients? And I would say that it'd be rather opposite. So we have now, again, a very strong focus on the US market. That is because the US customers are much more sticky. Their behavior is much better fit to our ideal customer. We actually seen that indeed different geographies, they have different type of customer behavior. And there won't be a different approach. I mean, the US is the focus of Text, of Text company.
So let's be clear. I mean, we are in 150 countries. We are in every industry.
So it's not that, so we have some data on how customers behave when the opportunities are. And definitely the US market is not matured yet, but it's by far biggest. And we definitely part of our strategy is to be focused even more on US market.
The next question. Hi guys, thanks for these details. What's the main reason for not investing more and paying out less in dividends? Do you not see more opportunities for reinvestments? Thank you. So actually we invest as much as we need to. We won't be spending money for acquisitions. That's not how we want to grow. So actually we will be staying to our dividend policy.
Yes, I mean, at some point I think we even overinvested in the terms of the team.
So at some point we even had too many people in our team when you look at our needs. So yes, we'd like to invest more, but we want to be a flexible company. We want to have a thin organization. And we really don't like the idea of spending more for customer acquisition because paid customer channels of customer acquisition still don't work well for us. And question from David O. Hi team, thank you for hosting this session. Thank you for being here. Are you seeing any competitive threats from AI-powered LLMs which might enable clients to create their own low-cost chatbot or might allow competitors or new entrants to develop new chatbots?
It is a very important question to our market.
Actually, I'm glad that we have heard that this question was asked. This is also a question that links to a press release of one of the big companies right before their IPO. So actually we think that the very big companies might be investing in their own bots, chatbots or the bots built, for example, on OpenAI. However, not every company is able to spend $2 million, $3million for building such bots. And the smaller companies, just like our clients, will be much better off when they will pay $200, $300, $500 monthly to providers such as to have not only the product covered, but also the risk of processing the data, for example, covered with a third-party solution like ours. So we think there is a place actually for both.
Yes, probably I think David also mentioned an opportunity to buy to create a very cheap chatbot. So yes, I think one is the case when you can spend like up some $3 million to build your own bot, versus a bot versus I don't know, let's say $100,000, $10,000 annual for buying solution like ours with the support, which is, you know, handled, which coming with the support, which is keeping up to date, and et cetera, et cetera. And of course, you can try create, I mean, cheaper in-house some bot, a very cheap bot. But I'm really not convinced. I'm interested in a lot of risk.
I mean, you have also some regulation coming, like AI Act in Europe, I think very strict, and not entirely clear Act, which is coming to the EU. And really probably, I of course am not entirely neutral here, but I think that could be brave to handle that case on your own, to care about data you process, when you run your business. Also, usage of the AI is not something you can have for free. It's not working like that. I mean, you can use ChatGPT for free for your personal needs, and you're paying with your data. You can't do that in your business and pay like that with your customers' data. You don't want to do that. So of course, I mean, AI is creating a change to the market. And change is creating a risk.
We are aware of that. We don't want to play down this risk. But there is a threat that we are not understand that the coming change. And some our peers are doing that much better job. But really I don't think that's the most important threat, which is now we are now facing. Next question. Congratulations on your 10th year anniversary. Thank you. When you said Chen was hired in Q1, can you please say how much? Is your churn monthly or annual numbers? We are referring to monthly numbers.
Yeah, we usually, well, when we discuss the customer churn, we refer to monthly.
In the last year and still now, the churn is at an elevated level of above 3.5%. But what I was mainly referring to when I discussed the period of January to March is the fact that it is not only the churn that is kind of usual, either voluntary or non-voluntary, but also some of the churn was caused by our updates to the price lists and to the terms of use. So, that was this component that actually followed, that followed after our actions.
Yeah, so we are below 4%. Usually an unusual, historically speaking, we used to have this 3% customer churn monthly, when we changed prices. More than a year ago, we for two months saw 4%. Now we are below that.
I mean, February, when some customer reacted to what we changed, it was like in the area of 3.8, which is a lot, but it's something we expected definitely. So yes, that's how it looks. And maybe that's important to stress the fact that what we are doing, in that quarter , was changing some things in the terms of the customers were abusing our policy, in terms of use of our product. And they were not profitable for us because of that.
So there is another question from David on a related note. Are you using AI in terms of new revenue opportunities or opportunities to cut costs? So, actually, for us, it is both.
First of all, since the beginning of the last year, AI helped us, among others, to optimize the way we work at the company. So, we were, first of all, investing in terms of AI, also developing the product. So far for LiveChat product, the AI features that are in place there are not sources of new revenue. This is something that we have, for example, tried to solve with this one AI assistant to actually showcase the usage of AI in the product. But for ChatBot, it is actually now the better numbers; the better satisfaction is guaranteed by AI usage.
Question from Lennard Krüger. Greetings from Sweden. How great to have you here, Leonard. We are always happy to see you at our webinars. Your growth seems in some ways to have reached some sort of stagnation.
What do you address this to enter, for example, any competitors taking market share? What are your key focuses going forward to drive future initiatives? Keep a good job and look forward to follow your future. I mean, we really appreciate that. Yes, I mean, definitely. That, I mean, the current dynamics, it's not which we're really happy about. I mean, definitely. At the last quarter, that January, March quarter, all however was much better than the previous, like two previous quarters. So of course, we we're happy to see better, even not as good as we'd like, but better results.
At the beginning of the road, I mean, the first thing is which we are doing is this things we are doing to, I would say, to improve our business, our price list, to concentrate on customers who are really bringing value. So, I'm referring to this optimization process we started. What we did in that quarter, in the last quarter, was the beginning of the process. We launched the process and we have a roadmap for what we want to achieve in some next two or three quarters. So, we definitely want to clean some offering, some plans which are not offered anymore, which are legacy plans.
We want to reduce the number of the customers who are abusing our products. So we are concentrated on that. And I think there is still a lot of potential. I mean, definitely there is a lot of potential in terms of the ARPU. So we should be able to allot much more to the LiveChat ARPU in the coming quarters. The open question is what the price is in terms of customer churn. So how many customers leave because of that. But nevertheless, we believe that the final results, which will be visible on the MRR, will be positive and it will be substantial like it was in the last quarter. But even without that, it's something we have to do.
It's something which is required to do to be able to proceed further. And saying that we work on some new things and maybe, maybe because that was something we were discussing the last quarter. Yes, we're working on some new things. We're working on some new revenue streams. And yes, in the next quarter, we will be able to show you some new revenue stream, some new, let's say, product, or way to monetize what we have in store already. I'm not saying that would be a huge thing from that day one, but something we are very excited about, something which is a very interesting initiative for us. And we're working on some other things which can happen or may not.
But we have some new initiatives we are working on.
Now we have another two questions from an anonymous attendee. What are your capital priorities? And the second one, how is the competitive landscape now? Do you see newer competitors? So I might start with the second one. In terms of the competitive landscape, we do not see many new competitors. It is quite as it was in the last couple of quarters. Definitely, there is slightly more competition in terms of the digital presence of particular providers. And of course, AI branding of the products is of greater importance in terms of showcasing or showing the products. However, especially when we look into the reasons of churn, for example, because that that'd be indicative of whether there are some competitors attracting our customers, we do not like no specific names stand out from others.
In terms of our capital priorities, well, we are a product company, so the development of the product is the key. We have some investments in the data, so combining the sources of data at the company. And also, of course, AI capabilities, especially with chatbots. This requires some additional capital. But there are no like extensive or like especially additional capital needs that we have now.
But we don't plan, definitely. We don't plan to raise any capital now. We confirm, as for now, the dividend policy is confirmed. So nothing, nothing to declare. Nothing new here. The same participant. Thank you both and congrats on the results. Thank you all. Definitely, it's we'd like to achieve more. I mean, our ambitions in the terms of the growth dynamics are definitely higher.
The last year was flat, really, if you look quarter-on-quarter-on-quarter. So, I think we should definitely be able to improve annual dynamics in coming quarters. Of course, any statement regarding the future is, you know, there's always some uncertainty. It's not like the forecast, but definitely something we really believe that is achievable. Regarding headcount, are you currently stable or are you anticipating any further reduction in line with what you reported in the last quarter? We are stable. It looks like stable. Probably we're going to be stable. We have some open position. There is some rotation, so probably we're going to be more or less stable in coming quarters.
You mentioned that the number of customers paying for all four products is now 59, and plus 10 of those were added in Q4 alone. Were there 10 new customers which signed up for all 4 at the same time, or were these 10 existing customers that added one or more products to get to four total? It's actually a combination of both, especially when the sales team discusses the contract with the potential customers, then that's the best actually time to upsell or cross-sell the products. So we had definitely some customers like that. Marcin, do you know if out of those 10 were new customers?
Definitely. Some new customers here as well. So yeah, that's the mix. And I don't know exact split actually. Sorry for that.
But thank you for bringing that because you know there is a lot of potential here. We're definitely not very good at bundling. We try to improve. Looks like HelpDesk's KnowledgeBase is some natural bundle, but you know they will be merged in the coming quarters. LiveChat plus ChatBot sounds like natural mergers, a bundle. LiveChat HelpDesk, not so natural yet, but we have some idea how to actually improve that link between these two products. And so yes, we're happy for these 10 new customers with four products, although you know still not something which is objectively a great result. We had also saw some nice upgrades during that quarter. We had one customer who added actually 100 new agents. So definitely good work from the sales team.
Another question.
Good afternoon. I wanted to ask whether management expects revenue growth to accelerate over the next few quarters, and could you give us more color on that?
Not a lot of color because we don't have an official forecast. But as I said, last year was more or less flat, flat-ish when you look quarter to quarter. We definitely, even looking just on what we expected to get from this optimization, let's say, optimization plan we had has definitely potential to improve annual dynamics in the coming quarters. At least when you look at MRR and U.S. dollars dominated results because of course at the end of the day we're reporting in zlotys and zloty-dollar exchange rate is not something we have control on.
Radim Kramule, next question. Thank you for the answer.
Our pleasure. Any estimate from your side about the size of the market in the US that you are targeting? Is there still an underpenetration in usage of similar products? Thank you. I think we had a very nice take last days from our sales team on that.
So definitely the US market is very special to us because this is where we target. And there are many businesses that are opened in the US like annually. So there is definitely still room for to provide such services as LiveChat to those customers. We still see that those customers that we have that start to use LiveChat are using the product this type of product for the first time.
So although we do not have like statistics on that, we like our feeling is that there is underpenetration in the US market, but also in some other places as well.
Yeah, but we had this; we had actually last week a quarterly status tawk.to call with our sales team. And actually we are told that we have at this moment more discussion with companies who actually are interested in automation, but actually they don't think about AI. They don't think about the bots. Actually they're thinking now about moving from voice to text in order to add AI automation a few years' time. Actually what they're doing now, they're thinking about moving from voice to text. So yes, tawk.to also I don't know now is a huge trend or just no coincidence and they're just a few customers who appeared.
But that's interesting. And definitely we, this is a huge market, this is a growing market. That's the best opportunity we have. There is definitely the trend for automation, not necessarily in favor of AI, but in terms of like written text solutions, that's for sure. Some of the customers are still, I mean, very cautious about using AI. And I think that's a good thing. I mean, really that it's great that some customers are very cautious about sharing data, about thinking about the safety of the data, about how this data is used. They also now know that some regulations are coming. AI Act in the US is, is I think it was, you know, passed. And with having this passed AI Act, some lawyers still don't know exactly what how it will look in the practice.
So, lots of question marks on the horizon. So, it's great that some customers and companies are aware of that. And it's also great that nevertheless some customers who are really behind in the terms of automation, look at in the terms of customer support, are now thinking how to make that the next step. I really hope that that's a trend here. And the next question from Radim. You have also mentioned a number of clients with all four products. Is this bundling at different RPU price? Would one assume that with more products used, a lower churn you would see? I think that's the very, very strong rule you have in SaaS business. More products, lower churn.
These customers are, you know, usual deals with the sales team. If you're dealing with the sales team, you can also discuss price. So if they were discussing price, maybe they get some discount. But nevertheless, the price is, you know, it's usually something which is discussed. And really, it's not always, even maybe not in most cases, it's the most important now. I mean, the most important for you is to being able to discuss what you can achieve about KPIs you can have achieved having these products.
So yeah, the next question is, can you tell why customers churn? Are you in touch with recent customers? Does your team investigate the reasons for why customers churn? Thank you.
Yes, and well, I think it might be a good time to discuss that. Out of customer churn, we have two types of churn. One is voluntary, so that means when it is the customer who wants to quit, who wants to stop using the product. And in such case, if it's the case, we can ask the customer about the reasons of churn. And the most popular ones that we get is actually others. So a lot of different reasons, but out of those which are very specific is either lack of chats or not enough traffic on the website. So that means usually those customers would go to free solutions. Then we also have a reason such as closure of business or difficult like changing the scope of the business.
And that's in the last few quarters that that's been up. Also some of them are price increases. And this is usually a very small one, quite stable, although from time to time it increases, especially at the times when we touch the price lists. And so was the case at the beginning of this year when we did some adjustments. And also some of the customers leave for other providers. And so this is the churn that we can actually track, but also there is a separate type of the customer churn, which is involuntary, and this is strictly connected to the fact that there is a problem with processing the payment. And it may be because the card is invalid or there are not enough funds on the card. And in such case, the subscription ends.
We have no way of knowing exactly what happens, although this has been the case of increased churn for some Asian countries recently.
So yes, the biggest, I think the biggest, difference now between what we can see now during last year versus what we saw previously, if you look at the voluntary churn, is that I have a problem with, but have a business problem, I'm out of the business, I am changing the profile of my business. The difference, the main difference is here in that area. But of course, that's not the full picture, but that's what the difference is most visible. And we're very happy with our net churn, because we have also a lot of customers who are using LiveChat on a seasonal basis.
So actually we have a lot of returning customers each day. And actually we count them in churn. So yes, actually a lot of them are returns at some point. The next question, do you have any channel partners helping to sell your products?
And I'm going to combine that with another question, which is,
okay,
two questions down. So I'm going to read that out as well. I feel like there are many people with online businesses who could benefit from products such as LiveChat, but don't even know about the solutions like this exist and how these solutions could help them increase conversions. Would you consider sponsoring popular YouTubers with a large following of business owners to increase awareness? And this is something that our partner program does.
So we indeed have a partner program where we sell, where we share, sorry, the revenue with a potential partner once they bring the customers. So they get a specific link and they do the marketing or they target the customers. And if they bring the customers, we share the revenue. It very much like how much we share depends on the effectiveness or the number of customers that such partner converts. But it is indeed a very important source of new customers because it is roughly 25% of ne w customers come through that source.
Yes, so now it's the single most important channel of customer acquisition in terms of the number of new customers. And if by any chance we have a popular YouTuber here, just look at our partner program, look at the Text.com and Terry Stubbs Partners.
And really that's a good deal. Looking at the industry standards, you can get from 20%-30% of the revenue we get from your customers, customers who came for us using your link. And that's a good deal. Really a good source of very sustainable income. We will be very happy to share this revenue with you. So yeah, a good program and growing program.
So I think that the next three questions, again, I'm going to combine into one. So they read as, in late 2022, you were able to raise prices ARPU for LiveChat significantly without a material impact on total customer numbers. Are you planning any further similar step change in prices in the future, not including future prices optimizations? If not, why?
Then another question was, how much can you increase ARPA in LiveChat via future optimizations in the coming quarters? Could you please explain what the optimization plan would entail in terms of actions? Would it be primarily turning off legacy plans and stopping customers from overusing the products? Thank you. So I think all those questions touch exactly the same. So our ability to change the prices. And first of all, optimizations and what can we do? So our thinking is that first, instead of increasing the prices for everyone, we have to ensure that we have a healthy customer base. So that means that first of all, we checked where we have the margins in each particular plan.
And when the actual usage of the product is the highest, but not necessarily bringing us money, because actually the more chats a customer has, the cost of service, for example, for us is higher. So we wanted to make sure that each and every customer is properly placed into a specific plan. And we started doing those things at the beginning of the year. That was the first thing we touched was the starter plan, so the cheapest plan. Then we will continue to optimize other plans as well. Marcin mentioned that we will change those legacy plans. So we have some old pricing plans still with some of the customers. We will be changing that. And also some legacy like pay per agent remaining, like a few dozen remaining customers.
So these things will be taken care of so that we have that the entire customer base is on the same plan, on the same plans and same pricing plan. So once we do that, and actually there will be two parts of that optimization. ARPU should increase, but the cost of that will be, of course, the customer churn. So those who will not be satisfied with the changes with churn, and we are ready to accept such changes, provided that the overall impact on MRR will be positive. So there's some of the churn we will have to accept. And once that will be done, and there's quite a lot of things that can be actually done this year, we will start to reconsider the price increases.
Yeah, the next question is from, hello, hello. Sweet, great, absolutely great to have you here. From our shareh older, Shrikanth Vishwanathan. So sorry for the spelling, I mean it's great to have you here. It's from people from Poland is sometimes extremely difficult to pronounce. It's right, maybe we during our next one-to-one call, we make some classes, some exercises. Anyway, the question, across the four products, what is the percent of your customers are smaller employers, 10, 100 employees versus enterprise employers? So I'm not sure if I had the very exact data on that. No, definitely looking at the customer, the whole customer base. The customer base is still dominated by small, very small companies.
Which I do. Or do you think we can be more specific at this very moment?
I mean, the usual data that we give is that with the, but it's not against the size of the company, but against the size of what our customers are paying, that our top 50 customers represent 8% of our MRR. But that's not really answering the question about the size of those customers. So we would have to work on this data, I think, to have it right.
Definitely. Yes, we're looking at the number of agents, obviously, and looking at the LiveChat, still some half of the customers, some 50% of the customers are paying for only one agent's account. So yes, definitely small businesses.
Then we have a question from Julian Roger.
Hello, good work and thanks for your humility. I wanted to know if you're working on lost clients. Also, why do you think Text will be able to return to two digits growth in the future? So yes, of course, we are working with the churned customers. Now, we during some specific times of the year, we have bargains for the churned customers. We also target them with, for example, our new developments or new products that we have. So that, for example, that was the case with OpenWidget. So yes, we try to keep them into the loop, actually. Especially that some of the churned customers are returning customers.
We've discussed that on the Polish call that we have some seasonality in terms of the customers who are coming back to organize like specific events, but also that use the product just for part of the year. So they are important clients as well for us.
Yeah, and yes, of course we are working on the huge numbers, on the big numbers here. So it's more or less automated in that area. We have the contacts for these customers and we have some offers for them. Usually around the autumn, before, you know, Black Friday, Sunday, Monday, we are coming with some special offer usually for them and we try to activate them. So yes, we're definitely trying to work with this group.
And about this two-digit growth, definitely it's, you know, as I said, I mean all the statements about future, you know, it's that's definitely not like a very hard forecast. But I would say the last year was flattish and we know what we want to achieve. We are ARPU and over the LiveChat. And definitely we think that the plan is ambitious and it's achievable. And the numbers should be substantial. The question is about the price we will pay on the churn side. So the question is on that side.
But looking at the LiveChat RPO, we definitely have some plan and exact plans and we know what we want to achieve. And that should be a you know, a growth engine for the coming quarters. And that would be enough because really the last year wasn't really great when you look at the quarter on the quarters. The question from Martin Novak regarding bundling, is there a ChatBot client that does not have a LiveChat solution? Hi Martin, once again. Actually a lot of them really. I think like in the area of 35% of the ChatBot are only ChatBot customers. One of the ChatBot feature is so-called chat widgets. Actually you don't need a LiveChat to use.
You can integrate with Facebook Messenger as well. So you don't need a live chat. At the same time, we have some other bots which are integrated with live chat.
Another question to follow up on your answer about the affiliate program. The limitations with these affiliate programs is that you are relying on people to find you and ask to be your affiliate. But I think you should consider finding YouTubers with large and high-quality followings that can bring this solution to more people. I believe this would be a much better effective investment to grow your other revenue base than other revenues of paid advertising like Facebook ads. Thank you for that.
We yes, of course, thank you. We tried different things when it comes to paid customer acquisition. I mean, it looks like Facebook didn't work for us very well.
Google Ads are making some sense for us. Facebook didn't work really well. But yes, I think you had your point. I mean, now we're spending some money. We're spending some money on marketing. It's not like we are not really spending nothing. We spend some money for marketing. We spend more than we used to spend in the past. Not a lot of money, but more than the history. And actually we rather don't try to target our potential customers. We try to focus more on potential affiliates, potential partners. So yes, we try to spend more money to target this group. Historically speaking, YouTube didn't work great for us.
We used, for example, invest more than we're doing now for creating our own content, video content. But maybe we should try again. Definitely. We're looking for different opportunities. And I think the last question for today, the last question we have from David Nelson. Hello David. I gathered the optimization stands for boost RPO plus remove loss-making misusers. Yes, that's definitely your own point. Could you give us a sense of what the potential improvement in profit per user is? I don't think so.
I don't think at this moment, especially that would be probably also AI costs will be higher because the one we launched, so we probably spend more on the AI just for using because our customers will use more. So actually what we gain from that optimization program, we probably spend because we will have more AI usage in coming quarters. Saying that being profitable is important for us and we will aim at the level or at the company's level, 50% on net profit margins is something we'd like to see.
Is that kind of the it's not like it's not like that would be most important focus to keep this profitability, but it's something we'd like to see on company's level. Of course, that's a lot of things which will impact that level of margins because level of profitability because the US dollar to Polish złoty would be extremely important for that, but I would say that's some targets at some level. And I think we still look at you have raised hands. Do you want to add something? Ask some last question?
I'm not. No, no, sorry.
Yeah, no problem, no problem at all. So I think that's all the questions. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you for your patience.
Thank you for being here. We'd be happy to answer all your questions you may ask in the future. And yes, Łucja, do you want to?
No, no. Thank you for your time that you've spent with us.
Yeah, thank you.
And see you next quarter.
See you, bye.