 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Dean Perine, Vice President of Client Strategy at JSA and joining me today is my new friend, Mr. Craig Monal. Craig is the Senior Account Executive for Messaging Services at KDDI America. Craig, welcome to JSA TV. Thank you, Dean. It's good to be with you today. You bet, Craig. Thank you. Craig, we're gonna talk about something that is near and dear to most businesses' hearts right now and that is the customer experience. The customer experience demands requirements have grown exponentially really over the last decade. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about what the drivers are behind that customer experience change? Sure, thanks, Dean. Yeah, customers are definitely wanting a faster and more automated form of communication. They want information like order and delivery status and those types of things quickly without having to wait on hold to speak to somebody. But really it's more than just that. I'm finding that customers want to communicate using a communications channel that's preferred and most convenient to them, whether it be SMS or a chat app or via their PC or maybe even via a traditional phone call. For brands to be able to provide a satisfying customer experience, they need to be prepared to use all of those types of communications channels. So even a regular phone call, huh? Yeah, believe it or not. So let's talk about omnichannel messaging, something that is against a big part of what you do. How does omnichannel messaging ultimately helping to create a more meaningful brand interactions? Yeah, well, omnichannel messaging, it's a key for a brand to provide appropriate customer focus communications and I kind of highlight customer focus there. Customers want to receive messages from companies that they know and they trust and that trust, it creates a loyalty. And for brands to maintain that loyalty, they need to be sure that they're addressing a customer's specific wants. And targeted messaging becomes a vital component. For example, Kitty Guy's omnichannel platform has the ability to accomplish this seamlessly by combining three separate communications modules into one code-free platform. And I say code-free because a developer staff is not needed to implement these platforms for a brand. It shares one dynamic database that has the capability to be tagged and segmented relating to specific customer attributes. And the first of these modules is called Moments. It's an outbound communications module that's event-based and it can be used for any type of notification or promotional messaging like delivery updates or special sales or things of that nature. The second module is called Conversations which is developed for more of an inbound contact center scenario. The same database is used here. So all of the customer history is automatically available. And then lastly, we have the Answers module which is an AI-based chatbot and it can automatically answer more general questions without the need for a live agent. Answers can be used to ask the customer profile type questions as well so that the customer is actually self-populating the database while they're speaking to the chatbot. Again, it's important to note that the customer data that's what's driving the relevant and important messages to each specific customer. We find that when this customer specific messaging is delivered on a communications channel that's most preferred by that customer whether it be SMS or email or a chat app, the overall customer satisfaction is enhanced. At that point, a real connection is made between the brand and the customer. Awesome, so we're spending a lot of time talking about kind of that enriched customer engagement but let's talk about what omni messaging means to the business. What are the powerful tools that omni-channel messaging brings to the actual enterprise? Yeah, I mean, this is a very important question and I'm sort of looked at it now from the end customer's viewpoint but it has to benefit the brand as well. And essentially there needs to be a financial gain for the brand, for this to work and that financial gain can be derived by attaining better sales results that are obtained because they're associated with improved targeted marketing that only something like omni-channel can provide. The platform also enables more buyers to be identified and reached out to when they're more likely to make a purchase and because that platform is tracking activity there's always the ability for an upsell and it can make new offers based on previous transactions that type of thing. Offers and promos can be sent automatically on a specified schedule using multiple communication channels like SMS or email, ensuring a better delivery rate so that that customer actually sees that messaging. And then from a contact center standpoint advantages are really lowered call times with a live agent. Easy customer questions can be answered with a chatbot and this is freeing the agent's time for more complicated and potentially more sensitive issues. And then of course when a chatbot can't handle the issue the call can seamlessly be handed to the live agent and that live agent already has all of that customer information on their screen. So essentially contact throughput is increased and another big business advantage relating to specifically to the chatbot is that it brings 24 seven capability to the table. So general after hours calls can really now be handled without having to staff an agent or certainly not as many agents around the clock. All of this adds up to a better customer experience which really always benefits the business overall as well. We find that there's almost an infinite amount of use cases that can be benefited with an omni-channel solution. KDDI likes to take kind of a design thinking approach to work closely with our clients so that we fully understand their business and then we can help prioritize their needs and then ultimately deliver the best possible solution. So you mentioned just now prioritize their needs. I see the overall value, the robustness of the omni-channel solution but ultimately how does that plug into a full suite of services that are as you guys talk about all the time really kind of designed to help to progress or move forward your customers' digital transformation journey. How does omni messaging fit into that? Yeah, and I'm glad you asked that question because the answer to that speaks to KDDI America's advantage in this space. One of our key advantages is reach. As a global carrier, we provide connectivity to customers everywhere on the planet using many different communication channels. It's important because people prefer to communicate using different channels in different parts of the world. An example might be India where marketing information is better sent to them via email than SMS because SMS in India tends to have more phishing and spam type content. It's more likely to be ignored whereas it's quite the opposite in the US. As we both know, SMS has a much more likely opportunity to be answered or read or answered versus an email in the US. It's one of the differences. And understanding those differences enables us to provide our clients with a better possibility for market growth and expansion. But there's more than just that. KDDI also offers cloud-based services that are designed to assist in workflow management and other tasks. And these services have been proven to improve our clients' operational needs. And then KDDI's infrastructure services also enable our clients to host their own platforms in our state-of-the-art telehouse data centers. And these data centers are connected to global networks worldwide. So you're getting full coverage. So really to kind of summarize I guess that we've got it all covered at KDDI America. Businesses, sales, marketing and customer service needs are covered using our omni-channel services. Operational needs are covered using KDDI's portfolio of cloud-based tools. And IT and infrastructure requirements are covered using our telehouse data centers and our IP exchange hubs. All of these services are scalable for businesses of all sizes. And they're dynamic, ensuring that for our customers both today's and tomorrow's needs are met. I love it. Craig, that is all the time we have. Thank you so much for joining me today. I truly appreciate it. Let's do it again sometime. Thank you, Dean. You bet, you bet. And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV. We'll see you soon.