 the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Welcome, welcome everyone to our podcast series, Data Movers. I am your host, Jamie Skado-Kutaya, CEO and founder of JSA. Along with my fabulous co-host, you know him, as well as I do top B2B social media influencer. Everyone knows Evan Cristal. Hey Evan. Hey, Jamie. Hey everybody. Thanks for watching today. Welcome to Data Movers, where we sit down with who's who in the world of data center, telco and beyond, reporting the infrastructure requirements of our modern world. Jamie, you know, customer experience is all the rage these days. It's something we talk about in a way that we haven't in the past. Do you have some favorite or maybe least favorite examples of customer experience in your world? Oh gosh. That's a tough question. First thing on a morning. Okay. Well, I want to say customer service is paramount. It's part of our core values here at JSA. And we look at it as a real partnership too that we're building a strong bonds between our clients and our team that we feel like they're part of our family as much as they're part of there. We are part of theirs. So, you know, it's the foundation of everything. You can't deliver quality services if you really don't understand your client's needs. So, yeah, companies that don't have customer service is, you know, part of their core values. I don't know, unless it's very transactional and there's no people involved, maybe like you just want to buy like a cell phone screen cover or something. I don't know. I don't know. I still, I look for customer service. I've actually walked out of a here salon just the other day. I moved to a new town and everyone said, this is the here salon to go to. So I walk in and they were like, oh, we only have one hairdresser and she's not available right now. And I was like, whoa, okay. So I am intent on making the one down the street, the really phenomenal customer service driven salon, the new salon. Yes, it's amazing how so many vendors, suppliers, providers take their customers experience for granted. I mean, even in the telco and data center world, you know, the ones who are winning are the ones who are making their customers serious and seamless and kind of delightful. I mean, I personally love Apple, right? And that you walk into the store, they know who you are, they know why you're there, everything is sort of integrated end to end, even online for e-commerce. You know, I bought an Apple watch for my son's birthday yesterday. It arrived 90 minutes later, hand-delivered at my door, and you just don't see that. And it's a shame because, you know, more companies need to up their customer engagement, customer experience game. And I think that's what we're talking about today, right? With a wear X that you're taking a really unique approach to help customers, their customers build lifetime value and up their game when it comes to CX and more. So, yeah, let's dive into that. Yeah, so we'll set Evan and it's a great transition as we bring in today's fabulous guest, Michael Matthews, the founder and CEO of a wear X. Welcome, Michael. Hi guys, nice to be here. It's so great to have you. It's so great to have you. We are honored. A wear X really taking a unique next generation approach to building customer lifetime loyalty, definitely top of mind now, holiday season coming, but also for lifetime value. So, where did this idea for the vision of a wear X originate and what were you seeing that needed fixing especially when it comes to our telecom industry? It's mostly come from my personal experiences, but you know, I'm putting a lot of my personal passion into it. And it's about 20 years old. I was I first joined the telecom technology industry in 2003. And in the 20 years that I've been involved in this industry, I've watched it's it's a it's a 1.6 trillion dollar annual industry, which about 80 billion dollars a year gets spent by the telcos collectively around the world on customer business support systems, operational support systems, which are directly intended to address the customer experience. And now over 13, sorry, over 20 years since 2003, take that 80 billion times. That's 1.6 trillion dollars that this industry has spent on things that are stensibly about improving customer experience. And I defy you define too many people of the 8 billion on the planet who would tell you that getting much better experiences from the telco provides. Now, having said that, obviously networks are faster, phones are much better, devices are much better, but that's in the other part of the budget. It's not in any way part of the 80 billion dollars. So I see this industry spending a crazy amount of money and not delivering the experience. And so we started looking at this back in, I suppose, 2003. And at the time, I recall taking a sponsoring us a global survey of telco customers. And we presented the results at Mobile World Congress, which is the largest industry conference in 2003. And at the time we found that 80% of telco customers would rather sit in traffic or go to the dentist than call the call center of their telco provider. That sounds right. I promise you, it's still the case. One of the major telcos in the US in two or three years ago created the concept of the uncarrier. And they were talking about exactly the same thing. They needed to dramatically change how they engage with their customers. Now, I've watched this industry continue to spend that amount of money. I was a key part of how that money was spent. I was the Chief Marketing Officer of Andox, which was the largest and most successful software company in this space. I was the Chief Strategy Officer of Nokia, which served 40% of the planet, I presume. And we found the same thing in all cases. It's interesting, Evan, you made the point about the Apple experience. Now, the cool thing about the Apple experience is that they have an ecosystem which they control. And over the years they have put customer experiences as their primary banner. And they have driven all of their systems and all of their processes towards that customer experience. And it gets better every time. I get a new iPhone every time it gets to live it. And every year the process gets better and better and better. And it's quite spectacular to how well they've thought through it. The challenge that the telcos have is that they've been in business since Alexander Cranbell invented the system in 1893 or whatever it was. And a great deal of the way that they do business is still the way that they initially did business. It was about people sitting, ladies in white blouses and dark skirts, sitting in front of a switchboard plugging in an item. And it was driven by a person who was a user needing to initiate something. And in many cases, that's still the case. Now, what you will find is that most telcos have anywhere between five and 15 different billing systems, depending on what services they're providing, who got to decide, did the marketing team get to decide, did the IT team get to decide, etc, etc. That's not an environment that is conducive to the type of engagement that an apple can deliver because they have one set of backend systems that's global. And they spend a lot of money on it and it works. Whereas telcos spend a lot of money on 15 different systems. And each of them may work, but each of them will work very differently. Every five years or so, they'll go to someone like Accenture or M-Docs or one of the big Indian companies and say, hey, we need to rationalize what we have. And they will spend anywhere between $10 and $200 million and anywhere between two and five years getting it all fixed. And during that five year period, the marketing department released 10 new products and went out and bought five new billing systems. So that's the challenge. Wow, that is a spectacular description of the landscape these days and the challenges that carriers are facing. And by the way, I love the Alexander Graham Bell reference, shout out to Boston where we both are in the area. So let's talk kind of solutions. I've heard you talk about the term intentional digital engagement, which is new to me. Maybe describe that concept through the aware X lens and what are the potential ramifications for B2B with that approach? So thank you. The environment that I just described is based on a lot of money being spent at the data center or in the core of the company. That's not where your customers are. Your customers are spread around the world. And so we've taken a completely different focus. We don't spend any money and we don't ask our customers to spend any money on their back end systems. We know how to find the appropriate pieces of data for the journeys that need to be addressed for the customers' particular requirements at their time. We put all of our effort into designing the journeys and ensuring that they are available at the preferred touch point of the user, be it an iOS, Apple iPhone user or an Android phone user or someone who is getting really interested in artificial intelligence, WhatsApp digital assistants or websites or voice or what have you. We've always said that we should think about and we should help our customers think about customer first. And customer first happens when you meet your customer out where they're engaging with you as opposed to in the back end where you're engaging with them. And further than that, we've described the concept of intentional because if you have 90 million customers as one of the major tokens in the US has, you should not treat them as one slab of customers all the same way. There's a different set of intentions that a baby boomer head of household may have in how they want to engage and what services they need versus a Gen Z or a millennial. Gen Z and millennial now make up the largest demographic on the planet. There is no way in the world that they're going to call a call center. It just won't happen if they have to do business with someone who wants them to call the call center. They are not going to do business with those people folks. So we've defined the concept of personas and touch points to describe how you can identify the type of user, their expectation of how they want to engage with you, their likely journeys that they want to address with you and how they prefer to meet with you. And what time do they prefer to meet with you? Do they engage with you at five o'clock in the morning? Do they engage with you using WhatsApp? Do they engage with you using Alexa Pay My Build? Do they engage with you using Facebook or whatever is their preferred way of engaging? Now most telco systems don't support all those things and we have put something in place to help them do that. And that's why we talk about intentional because you should have an intent for how you address every individual one of your customers. Wow, fantastic approach. So you've had quite a lot of success, very big wins with very large entities. Kind of walk us through some of the pain points that you helped address and describe the solution. What exactly are you providing to overcome these kind of challenges that the telcos and others face? So over the years we've evolved. We're a startup and we started small and we've gotten bigger and expanded our offerings and initially we were simply helping prepaid mobile customers pay their bills. Now that's a very simple thing to do but it actually wasn't very easy for people to do because in the countries that we initially targeted which were the Latin American countries people had to come into the store to pay their bill. They came in and paid with cash, they came in and paid with folded up bills that they've had in their wallet for a long time and it became very difficult for them. It was a chore. Now in some markets in particular in the Caribbean markets that we serve it was seen as a social engagement. People would happily come and stand in the store and talk to other people standing in line to pay their bills. We helped our customers recognize the intention if the customer wants to stand in line and pay their bill fine but if you want to make them make a life a lot easier for them so that they can pay their bill or their grandmother's bill or their brother-in-law's bill which is very prevalent in a lot of the Latin American communities. We engage with digital processes on iOS and Android. That's where we started just pay my bill on iOS and Android. These days the things that I'm excited about and now over the years we've added about 160 different journeys in our journey portfolio. So there is not a single telecom company on the planet that could possibly use everything that we have available because they do business differently. Customers in the U.S. don't necessarily pay their grandmother's bill but customers in the Caribbean insist on being able to pay their grandmother's bill etc etc loaning people some money sending money to a diaspora customer to enable them to pay their bill in a low revenue mark is important. What I'm most excited about now is some of the work that we're doing in helping telcos identify and onboard new customers. One of the things that is prevalent in the industry is that particularly mobile market customers leave you. You might keep them for a year you might keep them for two years maybe you've got them to buy to sign up with you because they wanted a new deal on the latest iPhone or for whatever other reason maybe there was a particular price offering that you put into the market last year that excited some people to join you and what you'll find is that many of the public they traded telcos will report when they report their financial quarterly results they will talk about net subscriber ads i.e. they lost subscribers and were they able to replace those subscribers. Churn and this concept is called churn and it's measured in what percentage of my users did I do I lose every month sometimes you know it can be as bad as 2% the best customers keep it under under 1% but even so if you're losing 2% 1% of your customers every year that's a lot of problem to deal with the cost of replacing those customers advertising marketing offering them the free self-sufferance etc etc is a crazy experience and then the process of helping that new customer sign up and become a customer is difficult in some markets increasingly I think around the world and we deal in many markets around the world the concept or authentication of who your user is is very important people don't want burner phones out there so they want to register the SIM cards so know that this is not someone who just bought a phone at the latest 7-11 they're using it twice and then it gets thrown away because it's being used for an affairious purpose so the concept of identifying new customers helping them sign up digitally i.e. they they have their phone they scan a QR code the process takes them through signing up identifying themselves authenticating themselves in those markets where it's important taking a selfie taking a photo of your passport ensuring that the selfie is a live person not a another photo comparing the two authenticating the users those are the things that we're excited about in some of our markets these days and you know it's it's probably relatively well known that you know depending on the market and depending on the number of services that you're offering it can cost anywhere between $50 and $450 to onboard a new customer depending on whether you're in Asia Pacific market the North American market whether it's a complex multiplayer user or just a simple user so the other part of this is the experience of the customer if you are agency or millennial customer you're not going to write in fill enough form you're not going to go into a store and and say I want to sign up you're not going to call the call center you want to do uh the sign up on your phone or on your preferred device or on your preferred touch point the way you expect to do business with most major companies so that's an area that i'm very excited about at the moment couldn't agree more um and of course innovations like AI and beyond are certainly going to drive uh and impact the types of solutions AwareX is providing as customers how do you keep AwareX offering fresh and transform the company as the future is unfolding before you? I said before that I think it was a lot of the the intent of becoming a customer experience company or it was was from my own personal experiences in many cases the things that we do as a company and there's a relatively small number of us here but the things that we do as a company is based on our personal experiences and we're spread around the world and we can ensure that we can draw on experiences from people based in Argentina or India or the UK or Ireland or Canada or wherever else we're doing business um the we have always said I have always said that there are certain things that we are not going to do we're not going to boil the ocean we're not going to work on those um 200 million projects for the back end we are going to work on doing stuff fast we like to deploy stuff in less than three months for some time some give us a contract to the time that an app in their trade dress is in the the Apple store or the Google store for their customers to download and start engaging with them should be three months or less um it can draw on whatever are the relevant journeys that we've already defined because we believe in selling off the shelf technology we don't believe in customizing stuff because that adds to the cost of ownership over time we have always said that um we will offer the touch points and and personas that are in demand and I talked about touch points be android apps or hayalex or off etc etc um we have already uh live with one of our customers a natural language solution um not using any of the the current chat gbt but you know it's it was based on a lot of those original concepts now that allow enables customers in the caribbean to talk to whatsapp or type into whatsapp um we then interpret what they've written because they don't know the exact words to use we interpret the intent of what they're trying to express we then marry that to a journey and then we produce the result that the customer wants um that you will know is very similar to the things that you're seeing from the the so-called AI uh large language models that are being presented these days having said that our strength was always in the fact that we understood the journey because chat gbt or google dialogue flow or any of the other natural language systems hey siri hayalexa can perhaps help you understand the intent of the of what the customer is asking you but you then have to take the action and you need to prod the back end systems to take the action and get the results of the user so we've we've tried to draw a very simple line between the things that are really difficult to do to drive our customer our um our secret source which is talking to the to the to the back end systems and and and creating the results and using what is most available um and most in demand by the by the type of consumer whether it's a the CEO of a small and medium business whether it's the the head of a household or agency how do they want to engage and if they want to engage by talking into whatsapp or talking into something else using their natural language then we can enable them to do that very smart very smart well i have to ask this question because you're the founder the visionary and hey it's timely 2024 right around the corner what do you see as upcoming for rare acts and what can we expect to see for the company in the next year ahead um the almost everything that i've talked about in the in the last 20 minutes or so that we've been talking about has has been in i think uh based on how telcos engage with their consumers and and i think that that's natural because we are consumers it's natural because that's the type of marketing that we see from telcos um however their business to business um or enterprise lines are so valuable to them um you know if if a consumer customer might turn every 18 months or two years your enterprise customers or your small and medium business customers tend to stay longer they tend to spend more with you they tend to identify services and procure services and grow their revenue over time with you um and we've found that um that that this is a this is a niche that is is growing potentially faster than the business to consumer market for telcos business to consumer is still the bulk of the business for that 1.6 trillion dollars that i talked about but business to business is getting to be in some markets up to about 30% of the um of their revenue growth well sorry of their revenue um so solutions for business to business customers uh is the thing that i'm very excited about uh moving forward we have our first customer for that they went live in mexico um two months ago they spoke on our behalf at a major event um in in europe this year uh back in uh september and um that's um it's an area that that i'm most excited about because a we can help them engage with the small and medium business customer beyond that i think that we can help that small and medium business customer engage better with their consumers and and and that's very exciting to me super exciting and what a natural evolution to uh just makes sense the future is bright absolutely all right so we are moving now to our rapid fire question section so we're going to ask you one pretty silly probably question and you just respond with the first thing that comes to mind all right how many words am i allowed to use uh just a handful short and sweet rapid uh rapid up uh but it's still um just a way to get uh to know to know the man behind the the video all right so um besides your phone which we've been talking about what is the one piece of technology that you can't live without carplay carplay yeah that's brilliant i would have never said that but yes how often do we use that yes you know it's it is driving how people make decisions about which colors they purchase these days yes i was just reading an article about that oh yeah sorry brilliant so that's so that software um you know it's the it's the technology that i'm about i admire most no it's it's seamless which is always the best part of technology almost invisible travel as an executive you must travel everywhere all the time any bucket list travel experiences on your list here where would you want to go and and why um you know i i've traveled to probably 65 countries um wow not always on vacation of course um most recently i did a my wife and i did a wonderful trip in tuscany with with friends and i realized that the place is great but the friends make the experience and uh i think that um you know probably then the next thing i want to do is travel to japan with my son who um i've been to japan many many times in fact i i used to work in japan but he has not been and it's been on his list for a for a long time we did travel to china together it was a business trip he was about 14 years old and and he put on a certain camp to most of our meetings and it was a fabulous experience he's a bit older now and a trip to japan is something that we would both like to do together amazing place uh so and by the way i was going to say extra points if you say something about it only and you did and i was like you read my mind i'm way biased as an italian american um but also japan amazing yes um all right so if you could watch one movie on repeat i don't know why you would but if you could for 24 hours straight what would it be favorite movie uh that's two different questions yeah that's true all right i there's no way i could watch anything on repeat for 24 hours i you know my attention deficit would just kick in immediately um even even some of my favorite movies i must have watched every one of the 25 james bond movies at least 10 times uh but having said that even watching one of them for 12 times that i'm not going to do that i've only watched some 10 times in my life i love um every movie made by christopher nollum um the um going all the way back i think i i think uh any of his i would classify in my favorite movies um he's brilliant yeah yeah good answer for me it's the godfather jamie what do you think oh the whole series absolutely i think i do that anyway i i love godfather too godfather too on christmas i'm like those those aren't christmas raito i know it was you fraydo diehard too i'm like why why anyway yeah i've watched those a few times too next question you uh you've been in telecom you know your old adult lifetime what other career would you consider giving a try completely unrelated um i love cars and you know i i consider myself not quite obsessed but pretty close to obsessed if i could and and you know there's time in my life that i can do this to be a an acquirer and restorer of antique cars would be something i would love to do that's amazing you and my husband would get along so well you guys get your cars like all through dinner uh and while i uh i don't know i'm strong i'm scrolling probably on my app or something but hobbies outside of of course transforming telecom any any that might surprises um having said what i just said uh this this is gonna surprise i'm very interested in motorsports auto racing four-wheeler one i've watched every four-wheeler one race that happened in the last 30 years um most on tv of course um i i think that that's an area that i'm i'm very very interested yes fantastic well it's been so fun chatting and thanks for joining us and michael i mean i think we both are really intrigued by your approach and in in a world of uh digital overload i mean brand loyalty and building customer relationships just becomes so pivotal i hope we can catch up but maybe overworld congress or one of the other industry events coming up in the next few months i've enjoyed this yeah as well it's been amazing and viewers if you also enjoyed our data movers podcast be sure to check us out jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming data movers episodes and of course other podcast series and follow us on x otherwise known as twitter at j scott and evan curstell so weird i can't i can't twitter acts okay we'll call it twitter i know uh and um everyone stay safe and happy networking