Facilitating smooth conversations between brands and customers

Her story

Tech entrepreneur, Katherine Pei, saw the growing trend of messaging and realized a business opportunity. As a marketing, communications and business development expert, she was well aware that businesses are often not in tune with the communication needs of their customers. She also knew that most brands wanted to fix that. In 2016, Katherine founded Whatsquare to provide a solution.

“Brands are willing to invest in chat automation services to do more than increase productivity and efficiency,” says Katherine. “They want to have better conversations with both potential and current customers, and reduce business friction.”

The challenge

Katherine noticed that technical hiccups such as slow response times and poor connectivity hindered the customer service experience. She saw this pain point as an opportunity to build a service that would not only help ease brands’ interactions with customers, but also reduce the incidence of disconnected conversations.

Her solution

Armed with these insights, Katherine launched Whatsquare in 2016. The product was built to help brands serve a new generation of customers who expect immediate responses to queries as well as personalized service. “We realized that the introduction of Messenger would be a gamechanger for brands in terms of communication between people and businesses. People would no longer have to download a new service to interact with their favorite brands – they could instead engage with them via Messenger whenever they wanted,” Katherine says.

Katherine and her team turned to automation and artificial intelligence to develop Whatsquare, which supports over 30 languages and specializes in smart product recommendation and marketing automation. Apart from timely and personalized communication, Katherine and the Whatsquare team work with clients to deliver services ranging from creative ideation, conversation planning, omnichannel messaging support and analytics reporting.

The results

Notable global enterprises such as ASUS and Clarins, as well as several Fortune 500 businesses, were quick to adopt Whatsquare. After building on the Messenger platform, Whatsquare saw its revenue grow 40 times over, which has given Katherine the ability to scale the company. It now has a presence in 13 countries.

"Developing a tool that has helped so many brands expand their personalization efforts and have better interactions with their customers is nothing short of exciting,” Katherine said. “We are glad to be a trusted partner to businesses not only in Hong Kong, but also around the world."

-Katherine Pei, Whatsquare