Kudosity bursts forth to transform your customer conversations

Friday, 15 December 2023 11:05

Kudosity bursts forth to transform your customer conversations

By David M Williams

Well-known global messaging platform Burst SMS is now Kudosity, reflecting the brand's curiosity about its customer's customers, which in turn leads to insights to innovation to value - to kudos. Hence, Kudosity.

Kudosity CEO Alex Macpherson explained, "A lot of hard work went into our rebrand." As a serial entrepreneur, the business has landed with many products in its portfolio.

For example, Conversr, a product pushing into AI and automation. "Conversr aligns with our mission of making the very act of doing business more human, more relationship-oriented," Macpherson said. "The goal of having a conversation - a relationship - takes time, but the scale of the process makes it a challenge to do cost-effectively. Conversr is all about automation/AI, and actualising the promise of AI to help businesses manage the art of conversation." Another is MTMO, "our wholesale relationship with carriers," Macpherson said.

While the company has clearly achieved success through Burst SMS, Conversr, MTMO, and related corporates, "microbranding different channels can have a diluting effect," he said. Hence, the rebrand to Kudosity "positions us for growth and the future."

However, it's not merely a title change. While the entire group has been rebranded holistically, it's much more than this. "It reflects our move to a unified customer-centric brand," Macpherson said. "The biggest part of our DNA is the relationship with the customer. The amalgamation simplifies our brand presence in the market, and signals the customer focus that's very important to us."

Significantly, the move to Kudosity simplifies the internal structure and relationships inside the business too. Instead of a series of related, adjacent entities, the new Kudosity is a single all-in-one company. The products will be unified, where, for example, "Having Conversr augment Burst SMS is fantastic. It will be our traditional campaign manager but with the bells and whistles of Conversr. It all rests as one platform, with one very clean, simple, and powerful user experience," Macpherson said.

Right now, Kudosity is halfway to full integration. "The products are all still accessible today," Macpherson said, "and the target is the end of the financial year - so 30 June 2024 - for the full unified experience."

Existing Burst SMS customers will already find their traditional campaign management is augmented with the smarts of Conversr now.

The plan to get to this point was careful and cautious. "It's taken a long time because people care from the very top to bottom of the organisation, " Macpherson said. "We spent extra time to make sure everyone in the business has been heard. Not everyone will agree on something as ethereal as a brand, but the most important thing is engaging both staff and customers in the process to arrive where we landed."

"We made some decisions and selected Kudosity. Once you have all the inputs and land on something, even those who were originally not sure are excited and engaged and empowered. It's all been worth the effort we invested."

This isn't the end of the journey, by any means.

"We're keeping our eyes on key trends in the industry," Macpherson said. "While short-term SMS is still the main focus for business messaging, things are happening locally and internationally affecting the future of messaging."

For instance, "carriers have just given MMS inter-operability a decent reboot, so reliable MMS can increase in usage. Previously, it wasn't as reliable as the rest of the market, but provides richer features and user experiences for business messaging."

That runway is extending even further. "Apple has announced support for the RCS messaging channel. RCS was slated a decade ago to be the big replacement for SMS and MMS but the devil is in the detail of a thousand carriers globally and until Apple engaged in the ecosystem it was never going to work."

Apple's RCS support will come live in 2024, so Macpherson says he and the Kudosity team are "keenly watching where that conviction and debate goes and if it brings back RCS to the fore as the next viable alternative," he said. "What it offers at the protocol level is far higher, with an almost app-like experience for messaging channels if it becomes freely available ubiquitous in any of our markets."

Another area Kudosity is focusing on is information security. With recent high-profile Australian companies suffering data breaches, customers are increasingly expecting their suppliers to keep their data safe both within their walls and that of the third parties they deal with.

"ACMA is very active," Macpherson said, "It's a great thing for the ecosystem and consumers. It's incumbent on all players in the market to ensure all marketing and communications are adhering to responsibilities."

"We build legal compliance into the very software our customers use. We build in opt-out management to adhere to the SPAM Act here and internationally. Our customers are all different; some have a high degree level of knowledge of regulations and others not so much, so our proposition is we have done all the thinking. It's built-in to the system out-of-the-box," he said. "It's a benefit to our customers to ensure we are compliant and provide a software-led way of helping customers do that too."

There are more big trends out there, too. "We only see great opportunities to add more value and more empowerment to our customers," Macpherson said.

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