Accelerating Our Mission to Reinvent Customer Experience in APAC

The last few years have been exhilarating for Toku.

Fuelled by an unprecedented growth in the digital economy, we’ve kept our heads down and focused relentlessly on building, and building.

Along the way, we’ve hit many company-first milestones. I’d like to share my favourite highlights from the past year.

Just last month, we launched our first research study of consumer engagement in Singapore, which found, among other things, that consumers prefer phone calls to resolve payment issues, and that the majority prefer to communicate with a brand within its own app.

Conducted in early 2022, the findings from this study have reinforced our belief that customer experience in the digital age is a vastly different ball game compared to traditional engagement methods.

These insights have also informed our strategy and brought us closer to serving our customers with an all-in-one customer experience and unified communications solution.

Two recent examples highlight our path forward.

In July, we launched our new cloud contact centre solution to great fanfare. We were privileged to host foodpanda at the launch event, and learned about the customer experience (CX) challenges they were facing and how they overcame them with Toku’s help.

Our strategic collaboration with Zoom — announced in September 2021 — also took off this year with increased momentum as more customers joined our unified communications platform as part of their digital transformation journeys.

Another initiative that I’m particularly proud of is our leadership in the fight against fraudulent calls in Asia Pacific. Toku is the first telco-service provider in Southeast Asia to join the Global AB Handshake Community. This is also aligned with our findings that consumers today expect a lot more from brands when it comes to security and the protection of their data.

Announcing an extension of our Series A

Thanks to the trust and confidence of our customers and partners, I’m proud to share that we’ve clocked a CAGR of 128% over the past four years.

Today, we’ve firmly established ourselves as a trusted CX partner for many household brands in the region, including foodpanda, Gojek, Decathlon, and Lenskart. We serve 17 markets across APAC and are processing almost half a billion customer interactions annually.

That’s why I’m beyond thrilled to announce an extension of our Series A funding to a total of US$10 million. The extended round was co-led by Delivery Hero Ventures and Malaysia’s OSK Ventures International with participation from Betatron Venture Group.

This extension, especially with our returning investors, is a strong show of confidence that we are on the right track and validates our vision of becoming the leading customer experience enabler built in Asia Pacific, for Asia Pacific.

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This is something that we are particularly proud of.

We are perhaps Asia Pacific’s only home-grown cloud communications provider that offers the full trinity of Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS), Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS), and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS).

That means that all our tech is built in-house, by people who live and breathe the region. Few other CX companies have as intimate an understanding as we do of how the businesses in APAC work and play.

We are heartened to welcome onboard investors who share our enthusiasm for solving the difficult challenges related to digital transformation and customer engagement in APAC. This confidence in who we are and what we do is a strong validation of the journey that we have been on so far.

Accelerating our growth across APAC

With firm business fundamentals and a proven track record of delivering on our mission of reimagining CX for businesses in APAC, Toku is on a clear path towards profitability.

However, we’re just getting started.

Armed with fresh funds, our expansion timeline is now greatly accelerated and we are set to rapidly scale our product portfolio and market reach in the coming year.

Here’s a sneak preview of what’s coming up next.

In the next 12 to 18 months, we plan to establish a local presence in Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Vietnam, South Korea and the Philippines. This will give even more businesses in APAC an opportunity to tap into our best-in-class CX technology and solutions, complete with local service and support.

To better serve these new markets and customers, we plan to double our total headcount to a strength of 200 by 2024.
Last but not least, we will continue to invest in innovation and technology to reimagine holistic customer experience for the digital-first economy.

This includes unifying customer experience and employee experience into an all-in-one platform to fuel personalised customer journeys for businesses in APAC.

Interested to come along and join us for the ride? Check out our available roles on our careers page or LinkedIn, or get in touch and let’s talk.

We can’t wait to build the future of CX together with you.