130,000 users across 146 countries and growing - Singapore startup Zopim story
Founders of Zopim, Royston Tay (CEO), Wenxiang Wu (VP Engineering) and Yang Bin (CTO) originally met while at an entrepreneurship program in Silicon Valley. In between full-time internships and part-time lessons at Stanford, they found time to chill out and occasionally work on a few startup ideas. Zopim was conceived during those all-nighters. After returning home to complete their college degree in Singapore, they spent two years painstakingly perfecting the product with beta customers before officially launching Zopim in 2010.
What’s their story? We catch up with Royston to know more.
Genesis
We never liked using the 'contact us' forms or calling the customer care service centers. We thought about a very simple idea during our late night discussions, “What if we could put a beautiful chat widget on every website, that allows site owners to easily chat with their visitors? Three of us started building the application from the scratch. We took two years to launch the product to public, but we wanted the offering to be simple, elegant and intuitive that makes life easier for many users like myself instead of going through all the hassle of contact us forms, emails and calls.
And today the efforts are paying off, we have over 130,000 customers in 146 countries.
Financing
There were early grants and a small round of investment by NUS Technology Holdings (NTH) and SPRING Singapore. We are 40 people strong right now, and are hoping to add more product-oriented people (especially software engineers, designers, product managers) in the coming year. Right now our focus is to improve and innovate on our live chat products, we're aiming to serve more businesses with a wider range of customer engagement products.
Revenue model
With Zopim you’ll start off with a free trial which has all the features of our advanced plan (such as unlimited chats, triggers, unlimited, full widget customization, and a weekly analytics report). After the trial ends users can continue using Zopim for free with some limitations. We know what it’s like to start a business, and to help others grow theirs, we are committed to maintaining a Lite package which will remain free for all users. Our basic plan is perfect for small teams as it is an inexpensive upgrade which lets them engage more visitors on their websites with unlimited chats and a couple of triggers and departments. Finally, our advanced plan is ideally suited for larger organizations, with features such as unlimited departments providing finer controls for organizing customer service agents, and advanced analytics to keep track of all conversations and agents.
Recent updates
We have recently released Android app, letting users continue the conversation on the go. We have also newly launched mobile optimized widget, which is a major improvement in terms of stability and usability, not to mention its mobile friendly features. It provides a better experience for mobile customers, with a live chat widget that automatically resizes to fit any screen and a redesigned chat button that looks gorgeous even on websites that are not mobile optimized.
Long-term plans
We're already one of the leading providers of live chat software (second in terms of market share), and we hope to broaden our suite of products to become the leading provider of customer engagement software in the coming years.
Customer testimonials that keep us going
“People don't like to use contact forms, as they are very complicated. But using Zopim live chat has helped increase our sales by 150%. Zopim really helps us drive sales."
“I would like to thank you for your excellent product! I own a website and we take orders for homemade food and deliver to our customers. In our business it's extremely important to be in touch with each visitor and have the tools to transform him into a customer. In less than 10 days we have gained more than 20 customers due to Zopim Live Chat!"
It's a cliche, but it is testimonials like these from customers that keep us going. With their moral and financial backing, we've been able to achieve profitability and rapid growth in the past few years. Continually delivering meaningful features and products that delight them is also something that our team is inherently passionate about.
More details https://www.zopim.com/ Try Zopim and give us your feedback on the product.