Using Zopim’s services, online shop owners are able to proactively engage their visitors while they are browsing on their web sites.

The paradigm of online chatting has gained critical mass on the Internet via social networks, but it has now become an increasingly important part of an organisation’s interaction with its customers. “Web chat is more than just a communication medium,” said Mr Julian Low, Co-founder of Zopim. “It is a paradigm shift in online customer engagement.”

According to Mr Low, using Zopim’s services, online shop owners are able to proactively engage their visitors while they are browsing on their websites. “This helps to increase customer conversion, especially when their users are also browsing other websites for similar products and services,” he said. “Imagine the possibility of intercepting a visitor when he or she is deciding whether to buy your service and you can see the power of real-time online engagement.”

While live chat is not new even in the corporate environment, the idea behind Zopim came about because Mr Low and his partners saw that there was an opportunity to realise its full potential with regard to customer interaction.

“When we first started out we saw that the market was littered with many antiquated live chat solutions that were built for larger companies,” he said. “They tended to have an overly complicated user interface, sub-par user-to-user interaction design and basically having a product that does not meet the unique needs of today's online business owners.”

By contrast, Zopim made sure that its product met the needs of its customers through beta-testing and garnering user input. “The result was a lightweight, mobile, and most importantly, the easiest to use live chat business solution in the market,” Mr Low said.

Basically a chat bar that can be embedded on a company’s website, Zopim’s product strength is its universal compatibility: it works across all major browsers, uses a browser-based dashboard platform, and integrates with all the popular instant messaging software in the market.

In addition, Zopim offers its customers analytical information about the visitors including the pages visited, length of time spent, web paths taken, and other useful data points.

Conceived under a programme supported by the National University of Singapore (NUS), the idea for Zopim quickly gained momentum with university seed funding as well as support from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA).

“We have received a lot of infrastructure, financial, as well as mentorship support that has helped us along the way,” Mr Low said. “On top of the many events that IDA organised to give us international market exposure, we were awarded the Technology Enterprise Commercialisation Scheme that gave us the crucial ability to do further R&D for our next generation service and be one step ahead of our peers.”

Today, Zopim is being used by major customers like SingTel and the National Library Board for real-time sales and customer support. “Though our solution is catered to small and medium businesses, some corporate but progressive customers have come to appreciate the uniqueness of our system and adopted the online strategy of real-time engagement,” explained Mr Low.

Zopim has also grown become relevant internationally and has grown its market base internationally across the United States, Europe and Asia. “We are now entering an exciting rapid growth phase,” said Mr Low. “We are positioning ourselves to capture the burgeoning online services market and are currently seeking talented and passionate engineers as well as online marketing staff interested in joining our crew.”