“Many gross sales groups now consider WhatsApp as their secret weapon,” says Wen Shaw, CEO and co-founder of know-how firm Cooby. The difficulty is, he factors out, that managing WhatsApp interactions with clients turns into increasingly more troublesome as companies get bigger. That’s the place Cooby, which is in the present day saying the completion of a $2.9m funding spherical, comes into the image.
Definitely, WhatsApp has large attain, with greater than 2 billion energetic customers around the globe. For companies, the messaging app gives a fascinating solution to work together with clients and prospects – it feels much less formal and extra rapid than emails and different extra conventional buyer communication channels. Clients prefer it too – they get real-time responses to their questions and queries, in a format that they’re used to in different components of their lives.
Nonetheless, enterprise use of WhatsApp could cause issues. Working outdoors of the enterprise’s regular methods and channels, protecting observe of WhatsApp messaging might be troublesome. The enterprise has no easy solution to keep on prime of what particular person workers members have been discussing with clients – what commitments have been made, say, or what issues a sure buyer may need. “As companies scale, this turns into increasingly more difficult – your buyer communications will not be related to your different enterprise instruments,” Shaw says.
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Enter Cooby, he provides. “Cooby is a software that improves data circulate,” explains Shaw. “It makes positive everybody within the enterprise might be on the identical web page on the subject of clients.”
What which means in follow is that Cooby’s instruments mixture staff’ WhatsApp exercise to enhance visibility throughout the enterprise. The goal is to interrupt down silos – particular person conversations are not caught within the WhatsApp accounts of every member of workers; the enterprise can subsequently take motion as and when it must, primarily based on a full view of every dialog.
Cooby successfully provides two completely different merchandise. First, its engagement instruments allow every WhatsApp person within the enterprise to organise their accounts extra successfully – for instance to group clients in line with want or stage, to take notes and to set reminders – to be able to increase their productiveness. Customers may even search for the LinkedIn profiles of their clients to get a greater view of who they’re speaking to.
Second, Cooby additionally provides a “staff area software”, enabling companies to handle their WhatsApp engagement from a single location, and to construct a dialog database; corporations may even use this to analyse the standard of their buyer leads and engagement. “It gives full transparency into WhatsApp, enabling a clean circulate of knowledge, data, and suggestions that empowers every degree of the gross sales organisation to evolve and obtain higher outcomes,” Shaw explains.
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Cooby founders Wen Shaw and Jocelin Ho
Cooby
It’s an strategy that seems to resonate strongly with corporations who’ve adopted WhatsApp as a buyer communication channel. Cooby solely went stay final yr however already has clients in additional than 80 international locations and has up to now signed up greater than 20,000 customers.
It operates as a software-as-a-service mannequin with most clients signing annual contracts to make use of Cooby’s instruments. Components of the service are freed from cost, with paying clients securing entry to premium companies.
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The corporate’s speedy progress has additionally caught the eye of traders, with the funding spherical introduced in the present day led by Sequoia India’s Surge and Pear VC. The Taiwanese firm is the primary enterprise from the nation to affix the Surge programme for Asian start-ups.
Shaw, whose profession contains stints with Fb, Dropbox and IBM, works intently with co-founder Jocelin Ho, who labored beforehand at Google, Ericsson and Google. “Messaging apps now dominate the best way corporations speak to their clients, however they want a way to handle that,” he says. Cooby’s instruments present that – for WhatsApp, but additionally for the messaging app Line.
