Delivering great customer support – interview with Customer Program Manager, Matthew Bai

Last year Precise Biometrics announced that it was setting up a new office in Shanghai to effectively support its customers in Asia. Matthew Bai explains how the new office is progressing…

Since I joined Precise as Customer Program Manager last November, it’s been an incredibly busy and rewarding six months leading the set-up of our new office in Shanghai. I moved to Precise after several years with Synaptics and I’ve been very impressed with what I’ve seen so far. Establishing the office here is an important part of helping the company to grow and succeed in China. With many years of experience working with fingerprint sensors, I’m particularly excited about the new developments and growing trend towards optical sensors as this is an area where I and the new team in Shanghai can really make a difference.

What are the current trends and how does having an office in Shanghai affect Precise’s work and what you offer to customers?

In China, similar to the rest of the world, the next big thing in biometrics for mobile phones is to enable users to authenticate with their finger on any part of the screen – not just on a button at the bottom or on the back of the phone. This makes optical sensors very important as they can be fully integrated into the display unlike traditional capacitive sensors. This switch to new technology therefore opens up a new area in the market and by being based in China we’re in a great position to meet the growing demand from our customers. There are two key reasons that we’ve established the office here in Shanghai – firstly to be closer to our customers and secondly, to be able to support them even better including faster response when they need our help.

By being close to our customers we can work more directly together and also learn from them. This is a real benefit and enables our second objective to support our customers more effectively working together on issues and challenges to create great solutions. We’ve already made significant product improvements through our tighter cooperation and yesterday we announced a new license agreement with a major sensor supplier in Asia. This confirms that our strategy, to be near the customers, has been successful. At the moment we are a small team, but the plan is to grow with more staff joining over the coming months.

Please describe your team and how they are contributing to achieving your goals by being based in Shanghai

My co-team members are experienced software developers and they are working hard so we can achieve our goals for the company. Of course we’re not doing this in isolation – at Precise we see ourselves as one team, no matter where we are located. We are always in close contact with the team based in Sweden, working on solutions and delivery together. Every day we have a quick call to catch up on the current tasks and align our work. It works well and we’re managing the time differences comfortably! So the momentum is set to continue and I’m looking forward to achieving some great milestones with our customers in the next six months.