“Enabling businesses to effectively communicate with their customers and build lasting relationships.”
Oho Chat
Timeline
Mar – Sep 2021 (6 months)
CLient
True Digital Group Co., Ltd.
Employer
Boonmee Lab
Tools
Figma
Figjam
Notion
Link
Visit website
Background
In recent years, chat has become the most popular channel for businesses to deliver customer experiences. In Thailand, customers prefer to contact businesses through social messaging channels like Facebook Messenger, LINE Official Account, and Instagram Direct Message. Boonmee Lab, the company I was working for at the time, had an idea to develop a chat-integrated platform for small to medium size businesses. There were several customer support chat solutions from both local and international companies. However, we felt they were not intuitive enough and lacked features to meet the needs of domestic businesses. Additionally, we had prior knowledge and expertise to tailor custom chatbot solutions for enterprise clients, so the company decided to jump into this market. At that time, I was the main product designer for this product from early-stage development to the public launch.

Currently, OhoChat become one of the most recommended intuitive chat-integrated solutions for customer support teams in Thailand, enabling businesses to effectively communicate with their customers and build lasting relationships. We have achieved more than 3,500 active businesses within the first 2 years.
my role
UX/UI Designer
Conducted research and interviews with target users to gather and analyze usability feedback, informing the design of product interactions.

Designed user flows and interactions for the application, informed by user research and testing. Created high-fidelity prototypes adhering to Apple App Store and Google Play Store design guidelines.
Challenge
One of the biggest challenges we faced was developing a new entry chat solution for customer support in an incredibly competitive market. The existing landscape was saturated with various chat-integrated platforms, each offering a range of features. Excepting from delivering excellent user interfaces, we needed to identify unique value propositions that would set OhoChat apart, emphasizing core features that meet the evolving needs of businesses.
Research
In the beginning, we benchmarked products in the market and created quick prototypes to visualize better user experiences. Then, we reached out to potential businesses, prioritizing customer support such as digital businesses, online merchants, clinics, and health and beauty services, etc. We conducted on-site visits to demo our prototypes, observe how they navigated our products, and gather valuable feedback on the core features. Most of the time, new features were introduced based not only on customer feedback but also on comprehensive insights from users.
In addition, we consistently monitored data tracking to gain insights into feature usage and behavior patterns. By implementing analytics tools, we could identify trends and understand how users interacted with the product, which helped us make informed decisions about which new features to implement. This multifaceted approach ensured that our updates were both relevant and valuable to our user base.
Product strategy
This comprehensive approach from the unpacking workshop has set a solid foundation for our next steps in the design process, ensuring that we move forward with a user-centered, data-informed strategy. By synthesizing all these elements, we were able to outline clear, strategic design objectives.
Chats and messaging channels are becoming essential for all businesses.
More than 90% of businesses in Thailand have customer support on their social media channels, including small and medium-sized businesses. They prefer social media platforms over building their own websites.
Language and pricing are important barriers.
Many small businesses are unable to benefit from worldwide services due to language barriers. Additionally, pricing for such services is often over-budget for these types of companies. Therefore, they require a localized product that is both affordable and easy to use.
Complex products can cause users to drop off.
When users encounter a product that requires too much effort or time to understand and use, they may feel overwhelmed and decide that it's not worth the effort to continue using.
People still need a tool that can help support their workflows.
Many products on the market heavily focus on building a smart chatbot that can replace human agents. However, we have discovered that people still need a tool that can help support their workflows in customer service, rather than replacing human agents completely.
Product core values
Insight #1
Most businesses need an integrated chat platform to assist collaborative workflows and enhance the performance of their customer support teams, not an intelligent chatbot to replace their jobs.
During the interview process with target users, including digital businesses, marketing agencies, beauty clinics, and health spas, it became clear that people didn’t trust chatbots to reply to their customers. They also found that setting up perfect automated flows of answers was too complex for non-experts. What they expected was a reliable tool to integrate different social media channels and allow admin staff manage customer information efficiently. Therefore, we decided to focus on developing the intuitive tool for customer support teams, enabling them to assist their customers with ease and enhance the overall customer experience.
Chat status
Most other available tools lack clear status indicators for how conversations are being handled especially after integrating a chatbot solution. It is important for customer support teams to know which staff member was assisting a customer and how they were responding. Without this information, support efforts could become confusing, leading to frustration. To address this issue, I introduced a chat status that changes based on the stage of the conversation to ensure a smooth transition between the chatbot and admins, as well as between admins.
When a customer contacts a messaging channel, a chatbot can provide an initial greeting and handle the start of the conversation. If the bot encounters a message it cannot reply to, it will display a different status to get agents attention and offer the customer an option to request human assistance. Once notified of this request status, agents must step in to continue the dialogue, provide support, and conclude the conversation.
For the interfaces, each chat status occupies different color palettes, helping to indicate whether a customer is being assisted by an admin or a chatbot. The scheme is also applied to bubble messages in chatroom so that managers can quickly see which staff member is handling a particular customer, along with the conversation history, helping them manage support cases more effectively.
Automated ticketing system
OhoChat also features an automated ticketing system that assigns tickets based on predefined rules and priorities. Users can also manually assign chats to the preferred admin. This system ensures that customer inquiries are handled in a timely manner, reducing response times and improving overall customer satisfaction. Automation helps reduce the redundant workload that admins regularly experience in other customer support tools, where they manually create tickets to track various issues and their details. It also provides an accurate performance assessment of individual staff.
For the UI, I designed a compact timing interface integrated into the chat status. This allows agents to easily track the response time and resolution time of each conversation.
Response Time
When a chat is triggered into request status, a new ticket will automatically open and start collecting response time.
Resolution Time
When an agent is assigned to the chat, the resolution time begins counting and continues until the conversation ends.
Ticket details
In the expanded view of a ticket, users can see more details, such as response and resolution times, which can be compared to the business's average performance. Users can edit the name, description, and tags and attach important media relevant to the ticket to provide more information. The activity log offers a comprehensive timeline of how the conversation has been handled. Additionally, a direct link to this ticket can be copied and shared with others for reference.
Performance Dashboard
Manager users can view their customer support team's performance in a service dashboard that provides important KPIs and intuitive charts to compare collected data. Users can also see the total number of tickets from the selected timeframe and the average number per agent to assess workload. Additionally, tagging can be utilized to help businesses track and analyze the frequency of different types of issues handled by support teams. This detailed tracking and analysis enable businesses to identify trends and make informed decisions to enhance their customer support strategies.
Insight #2
Most available products still lack features that help customer support teams manage their shared knowledge and frequently used assets.
When there is a new update on shared assets, such as promotional graphics or a new monthly announcement, most businesses tend to use various other tools or group chats within personal messaging platforms to distribute these new information. This approach, however, can lead to inefficiencies and inconsistencies, as different team members may use different methods for storing the assets. As a result, important updates might get lost in the shuffle, and team members might waste time searching for the latest versions of the assets. To address this issue, a more centralized and organized solution is needed, one that ensures all team members have easy access to the most up-to-date assets in a timely manner.
Saved replies
The Saved Replies feature in OhoChat allows customer support teams to store and quickly access pre-written responses to common inquiries. This functionality helps agents save time by providing consistent and accurate answers without having to type them out repeatedly. By using saved replies, support teams can ensure that their customers receive prompt and uniform information. The feature is particularly useful for handling frequently asked questions and standardizing responses across the team.

The interface allows users to create a response pattern with multiple bubbles of text messages and attachments. This is better than other products that are limited to a single bubble and one attached media.
Media library
The platform includes a media library where support teams can store and manage frequently used assets like images, videos, and documents. This feature allows all agents to quickly access a single source of media, use the most up to date version and reply back to their customers with correct information.
Furthermore, I designed this feature to be capable of not only being used for replying in the chatroom, but the file in the media library can also be utilized in different features such as the chatbot, where users can select a file from the media library to attach as instance in an automated reply pattern, or in saved replies, where users can attach it into the response template. When users want to update the file, for example, to publish a newer version of advertisement, they can go to edit the master file in media library. This change will automatically update every instance where the file has been attached, providing an instant update. Consequently, users don't have to waste time making updates place by place.
Attaching instance
This interaction design provides a convenient experience and intelligent examples of how features can benefit each other within the platform.
Shortcuts
With a strong foundation in core features, we can create suggest automation shortcuts for users to improve their customer service workflows by utilizing shared assets, tags, and user behaviors. This system can suggest a set of actions based on user input. Users can write their own prompts to let the system perform consecutive tasks or bulk actions. They can also mention assets such as images or saved replies, as well as other agents.
Saved replies, media library, and shortcuts clearly demonstrate the direction I aimed for: to create a powerful chat management tool for support teams to work together seamlessly, enhancing business performance. When I introduce new features, I don't see them as separate or isolated. I always aim to push for the bigger picture and imagine if there are other potential features that can be built on top in the future. This usually helps define the design into phases and control the pace of development.
Insight #3
The tools currently available in the market offer a limited number of integration channels for social media and typically feature expensive pricing structures for larger support teams.
Many businesses and services in Thailand usually have multiple of social media channels. For example, a dental clinic with five branches in Bangkok employs a team of 15 admins to manage customer support across all its locations. However, each branch requires individual customer interactions, therefore they need five separate Facebook Pages or LINE Official Accounts to provide messaging services for their customers. Most available tools in the market limit businesses to a single integration per social media platform, which becomes a significant pain point for this clinic. The inability to connect multiple accounts under one system prevents the clinic from using chat-integrated tools effectively, as they fail to meet the operational needs of managing multiple branches.
Social integration channels
While other tools have limited integration options, OhoChat provide multiple and flexible integration of social channels.
From this insight, I proposed a new flexible pricing strategy for our product to accommodate different types of businesses. Additionally to selecting a package of subscription, they can choose to increase the number of channels and the number of members in the platform. After introducing this option and new pricing scheme, we have seen an increasing number of new businesses signing up, which later converted into long term subscriptions.
Results
OhoChat has received numerous positive feedbacks from users and is regarded as one of the most easy-to-use chat solutions in the market, packed with abundant features that meet user needs and scale rapidly. This success is attributed to our deep understanding of customer insights and a well-aligned product roadmap that optimizes and connects existing core features, rather than introducing entirely new directions that would require substantial development costs.

By continuously gathering and analyzing user feedback, we have been able to fine-tune the platform to address the specific pain points of our users, ensuring that each feature is both relevant and highly functional. Our approach to development focuses on iterative improvements and seamless integration of new capabilities, which has allowed us to maintain a fast-paced release schedule without sacrificing quality. This strategic alignment not only maximizes resource efficiency but also enhances the user experience, making OhoChat a preferred choice for businesses looking for a robust and scalable customer support solution.