Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight: Yaoyee Ng & Zane Lim, Worq Health

Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight: Yaoyee Ng & Zane Lim, Worq Health

Company Name: Worq Health 
Founder Name(s): Yaoyee Ng and Zane Lim
LinkedIn: Worq Health Company Page
Industry: Healthcare, Artificial intelligence (AI)
Stage/Funding: Pre-Seed
Location: Singapore

This is a post in a series of interviews with startup founders who have worked with Twilio Startup Labs, a program for developers at early-stage startups to learn how to build, prototype, and demo on Twilio. We had the pleasure of working with Yaoyee Ng and Zane Lim on their startup, Worq Health.

Describe your company (Startup) journey in 160 characters or less (the original length of a text message)

Worq Health is an AI recruitment platform for nurses and healthcare workers, supporting many public and private healthcare institutions across Singapore today.

Why did you start your company?

The healthcare industry is facing a huge crisis in nurse recruitment and retention. The existing tools and solutions today are unable to support the complexity and scale of nursing recruitment. The existing methods just won't suffice anymore, and the need for a more robust and nuanced technology solution for healthcare is long overdue. We started Worq Health to solve for a more efficient, smarter, and better hiring process for both nurses and healthcare administrators.

Worq Health was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic to help improve the allocation & retention (staffing) efficiency of nursing across healthcare facilities in need. Fast forward to today, we have thousands of nurses on our platform and also expanded to support healthcare institutions in Singapore with the hiring of permanent nurses.  

How are you building on Twilio? E.g., How do you use email, SMS, WhatsApp, Verify, etc. to communicate with your customers?

We are using Twilio SendGrid's email APIs to send onboarding instructions and job notifications to nurses. Through our in-house matching system and custom email templates from SendGrid, nurses receive tailored job notifications that align with their preferences and skillsets. This prevents overwhelming nurses with irrelevant information, increasing their likelihood of engagement and application submission.

In addition to delivering email notifications, we are using Twilio’s SMS API capabilities to send real-time job alerts and updates directly to nurses' mobile devices. Our goal is to provide convenience and responsiveness, making sure nurses never miss out on valuable opportunities, even when they are not actively checking their email.

Lastly, we have implemented Twilio Flex platform to optimize our customer support operations.

With Twilio Flex, we now have the capability to engage with our nurses and facilities across various communication channels, including voice calls, SMS, and email, all from a single, unified interface. Our support agents can now manage multiple conversations simultaneously, resulting in quicker response times and heightened customer satisfaction.

What has the benefit or commercial impact been for your business since using Twilio?

Since integrating Twilio SendGrid into our business, we witnessed a significant increase in nurse engagement, job applications, and successful placements. Our platform's user satisfaction has soared as nurses appreciate the convenience, reliability, and tailored experience offered through Twilio SendGrid's email and SMS capabilities.

With Twilio Flex, our support agents deliver faster response times and seamless omni-channel communication to our nurses. The ability to assign nurses to specific agents ensures a personalized and consistent support experience, allowing for better tracking when nurses successfully secure job placements. The real-time analytics provided by Twilio Flex also empower data-driven decision-making, further improving our support operations.

By building on Twilio, what has the impact been for your customers?

The implementation of Twilio Flex has increased our responsiveness and efficiency in customer support, ensuring healthcare facilities and nurses receive the assistance they need promptly and seamlessly. By leveraging Twilio solutions, we have established ourselves as a reliable and efficient nurse recruitment platform, creating strong connections between healthcare facilities and qualified nurses.

Are there any future Twilio Products that you plan to integrate into your startup, and if so, why?

We are exploring Twilio Studio Flow as a solution to streamline our customer support workflow. We plan to develop a chatbot capable of handling general inquiries from nurses. When a nurse submits an inquiry, it will flow to our chatbot, which will provide automated responses based on the nature of the inquiry. If the chatbot is unable to address the query, the conversation will be routed to a human operator for further assistance. This approach helps us minimize the need for human intervention, enabling our support agents to allocate their time toward more complex and specialized cases.

Have you enjoyed Twilio Startup Labs? And if so, why?

Absolutely, Twilio Startup Labs provided us the resources and guidance (via direct access to Twilio employees during office hours) to start building and creating value for our customers. We also enjoyed the Demo Day, where we got together with other fellow startup peers and Twilio employees to present innovative solutions, exchange ideas, and have fun.

What is the best piece of advice you would give to founders who are looking to build on Twilio?

Twilio offers an incredible advantage by placing you in direct control of the pivotal conversations with your customers. This direct interface isn't just communication but a chance to deeply understand, engage, and build trust.

What excites you most about being a founder?

We are optimistic that AI will have an incredibly huge impact on healthcare, especially with applications of Generative AI and  large language models (LLMs). The opportunity to build and solve one of the most important problems in healthcare has been a truly exciting and inspiring experience for us.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to read more Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight interviews and learn how others build, prototype, and demo on Twilio, please check out the series of articles here.

For questions about Twilio Startup Labs or to learn how to get involved, please contact Frank Y. Owusu at fyawowusu@twilio.com. 

To find out more about how Twilio supports Startups, check out Grow with Twilio.