Introducing Chatbot Malaysia
Transition into a new model amid crisis
When we started Chatbot Malaysia, our mission was to help small and medium enterprises (SME) who aimed to scale and grow their businesses with automation and digital marketing. As online marketing grew immensely in popularity, in the beginning of 2020, we set out to help the entrepreneurs in achieving their marketing goals with our end-to-end solutions which included utilizing our expertise in Facebook Ads campaigns, workflow automation and Chatbot integration.
COVID-19 Outbreak
Due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak, the Movement Control Order (MCO) was enforced in Malaysia in the month of March. It has caused a severe disruption in the movement of the economy as all non-essential businesses were not allowed to operate for an indefinite period of time.
As both our own team and our clients have suffered directly from the consequences of the event, we decided to support the community by producing more educational content and sharing our stories with fellow entrepreneurs in Malaysia amid the self-isolation period. Meanwhile, our mission remained the same in helping entrepreneurs to grow their businesses by combining our expertise in digital marketing and automated bots integration.
However, moving deeper into the extended MCO period, we noticed that most of our clients have been impacted by the uncertainties surrounding the movement and economy of the country. As a result, the entrepreneurs whom we have set out to help were dealing with the loss of customers and financial pressures from their businesses. Therefore, we realized that, while our mission persisted, the solutions we provided are not what they’re looking for anymore, in the current challenging times filled with uncertainties and unforeseen circumstances.
Crisis Management Mindset
While it was tough to hear from our clients that they are unwilling to invest in our strategies to cultivate growth in their businesses amid the MCO, we regrouped and went back to the drawing board.
In the wake of a crisis, our team started identifying the priorities of our company through the lens of the community of entrepreneurs while staying driven towards our very mission to help them with their business. As all parts of our team are involved in frequent interactions with our clients, each of our teammates has adhered to the fundamentals of listening and empathizing with the clients. This has effectively provided a timely pulse check and provided valuable feedback for us to brace the challenges ahead.
Our strategy in fulfilling our mission as an organisation to the entrepreneurs has drastically changed in the span of a month. However, with an agile team, the change in strategy has galvanized us to work towards our new goals and mission instead of leading to a drop in team morale.
“We want to help entrepreneurs who want to grow their business but don’t have a system to instantly engage and interact with their customers on demand.”
Transition into a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Model
It was apparent that we needed to adjust our mission to these entrepreneurs amid the crisis. Therefore, instead of helping them to grow and scale their businesses, we now aim to help them survive this crisis by automating their customer and sales support workflows. As our founder an CEO, Carliff Rizal put it, we want to help “entrepreneurs who want to grow their business but don’t have a system to instantly engage and interact with their customers on demand”.
As our expertise still remains in the areas of automation and chatbot integration, we have decided to execute our mission by providing a cost effective entry point to automation instead of offering our previous end-to-end customized marketing solutions.
As an alternative to the long term investment for customized digital marketing services, we have defined a more cost effective product for which users pay a monthly subscription fee as a more client centric solution to their problems and challenges. Therefore, we have sharpened our team’s focus in transitioning into a SaaS business model.
Introducing Our Whatsapp Chatbot
From offering fully customized digital marketing solutions, we instead utilize our expertise to introduce a new product, the Whatsapp Chatbot. As the objectives of many small businesses are to build and maintain their relationships with their customers amid this crisis so they could prepare themselves to succeed and grow after bracing through this challenging period. However, there are many entrepreneurs who don’t have an automated system and tools to offer an efficient and personalized customer and sales support.
From our interviews with our clients, the majority of them have a small team which has other responsibilities other than customer service in their organisations to provide the support service. In a few cases, the business owners themselves are involved in offering customer support.
Identifying this specific pain point in our clients, the launch of the Whatsapp Chatbot is driven by our goal in helping these businesses in their first touch points with the customers. In Carliff words, We plan to accomplish that goal by “guiding them in their journey in installing and setting up an automated system that generates personalized messages to their customers”.
“Our goal is to guide the entrepreneurs in their journey in installing and setting up an automated system that generates personalized messages to their customers.”
Looking Ahead and Beyond
In contrast to our previous mission in helping them to grow by expanding their customer base, we are now targeting to provide a solution which improves their customer satisfaction and loyalty.
In order to achieve this target, our Client Success lead, Alta Hego, understands that it would take more than just “installing a turnkey system to automate customer support” and we hope to “educate them on proven strategies to convert these inquiries into sales, so they can maximize their profits”.
Therefore, our team is prepared to carry out Chatbot Malaysia’s mission by producing more educational content about Conversational Marketing strategies and its importance in fostering customer relationships and heightening customer loyalty. One of the initiatives to carry out this mission is to launch our Medium blog.
Furthermore, we are planning to launch an omni-channel messaging automation platform where you could integrate all of the communication apps you’ve been using, including Messenger, WeChat, Line and more, into one single platform. This allows you to engage and interact with your customers in one place, regardless of how or when they connect with you.
We believe that we are sharing the same boat with all the entrepreneurs out there who have been impacted by the current crisis. And, we also believe that we share the same objective with you as business owners in overcoming this challenge and set ourselves up to thrive once the crisis is over. Hence, Chatbot Malaysia shares a common goal of maintaining a successful relationship with our community and bracing ourselves for this crisis together.
“To ensure the success of our clients, we hope to educate them on proven strategies to convert these inquiries into sales, so they can maximize their profits.”
Originally published in Chatbot Malaysia’s Blog.
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