After COVID-19 spread globally two years ago, many physical interactions were displaced by virtual communications. Hunkered down, people moved parts of their lives online, and businesses had to do the same. However, not all companies had the capabilities or know-how to connect with their customers through these channels.
This is the gap in the market identified by the founder of TheOmelet, Kasama Jatejarungwong, so she established Cate to provide a service that eases the transition.
Cate’s current client base consists mostly of large enterprises such as Shell and Prudential. It plans to offer its services at competitive prices to micro, small, and medium enterprises soon. Although Cate currently only serves clients in Thailand, the company has plans to capitalize on Southeast Asia’s thriving social commerce sector.
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Often, social commerce and the interactions with consumers that come along with it are labor-intensive and may take a mental toll on employees. This may hamper a key objective: companies need to maintain a constant presence online to respond to customers, who may experience long wait times when this is not possible. Human error also happens every now and then. Such issues may lead to an inconsistent customer experience.
To meet the needs of all three parties in this scenario, Cate’s solution is a chat automation platform that can help businesses centralize all customer enquiries from platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, and provide predefined automated responses. Cate also offers a range of ready-made templates and chatbots designs to fit the sectors that its clients operate in.
By providing companies with more than 100 templates to choose from, Cate’s solution reduces (but does not eliminate) the need for human intervention in interactions with customers, with the chatbot being able to automatically handle tasks such as answering frequently asked questions, and handling bookings and payments. It also collects data related to customer interactions, so that businesses can formulate insights about their customer base.
Cate’s service is not meant to completely replace the work of humans in interactions with customers, given that the spectrum of questions that can be asked is extremely broad. So, for instance, questions about new products or prices can be handled by Cate’s bots, while more complex queries will require a human touch. However, the service is still expected to reduce operational overhead and improve the overall quality of customer experiences.
Cate is the brainchild of its parent company, TheOmelet, which has created chat automation solutions for more than 45 companies over the past four years.
Cate was among the ten finalists of the Alibaba Cloud x KrASIA Global Startup Accelerator Singapore-Thailand Demo Day that was held on January 11.