Chatbots are 'an entry point towards constructing a customer journey', says entrepreneur who found his footing in travel after two failures.

TWO failures later, former government scholar-turned-entrepreneur Joseph Ling may have finally found his footing with Vouch, 'the app-less hotel digital concierge', and he may well have travel and hospitality, and Covid, to thank for it.

Yes, strange as that may sound but when you read about his journey, you will understand why.

Joseph Ling (right): “The magic of chat is, it helps you to figure out what guests are looking for, even if you don’t have the feature. You track the conversations and you will find questions always lead to people wanting to make transactions.”

Ling, who came up through the SPRING Singapore system, which encourages scholars to “be your own boss”, started Vouch in 2016 with a government grant, after completing his two-year bond.

The business then was voucher-based – hence the name – and what it did was amass big data for retail advertising, and enabled advertisers to target customers with vouchers.

He had big dreams. “I was a first time entrepreneur, I was a bit arrogant and made mistakes. I thought we could conquer the market in three months, we ended up building a platform that no one was willing to pay for. People kept asking us to add features and we kept building, but no one would pay for it.”

So first lesson learnt – build only what people will pay for.

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