Jon Yongfook’s third startup brings a dose of Japanese gaming fun to customer support

Customer support is a tricky thing – it has to feel both personal and efficient simultaneously. Lose the personal touch, and customers feel neglected; slow down to do that, and they feel like their time is being wasted. Chat apps such as Zopim currently provide the best solutions, but even they are very limited – especially for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startups – according to serial entrepreneur Jon Yongfook.

“Chat works, but someone always needs to be on the other end,” he says. “In addition, in our experience running another SaaS business for two years now, we estimate that around 60 to 70 percent of all support requests we received were on the same topics. That means there are a lot of inefficiencies to solve here.”

To make customer support more enoyable for customers, Yongfook decided to take a stab at it with his third startup to date, Intellihelper. It takes a leaf out of the pages of Japanese role-playing games by layering voice-guided, interactive tutorials that take the user through a website’s features a step at a time.

The image above immediately brought to mind games such as Pokemon, and Yongfook says that this is intentional:

In those games you often have fictional characters talking to the player on screen, and yet we think those games are pretty successful at creating a relationship with the player. So we are bringing that same sense of relationship to customer support. Experiencing Intellihelper talking to you and guiding you round a website is a lot more fun than a boring chat window, or a slow-moving email chain, or waiting endlessly on hold on the phone!

Apart from breathing some life into a tutorial or demo, it is also highly scalable simply because there is no need for someone to be on the other end.

Despite these points, Yongfook still considers Zopim as an example to follow in becoming a world-class, global-facing company, as well as a necessary part of the customer support ecosystem. Zopim was bought out by US-based customer support company Zendesk last year.

“I think for us, our focus is going to be on getting the product right, just like the Zopim folks did. Ultimately, we are working on different angles of a very broad problem,” he says. “I see live chat, email, knowledge base software, and interactive tutorials – all of these pieces as complementary to each other in providing really awesome customer support.”

A better way for SaaS startups

One might wonder why Yongfook would jump into customer support following his previous two startups, which focused on press releases and social media respectively. He explains that he is simply scratching his own itch.