CXTech Week 31, News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 31 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech?  The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.

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Quiq raises $12.5 million to bring bots and messaging to customer service

Quiq offers a business messaging platform that makes it easy for businesses to integrate multiple messaging tools into their websites and apps, including SMS, Apple Messages (via Apple Business Chat), Twitter, Facebook Messenger, web chat, Kik, and Google’s RCS-based RBM. Quiq also enables companies to integrate messaging into their own native mobile apps, and it offers a one-way “broadcast” service for disseminating important messages to customers.

Quiq announced it has raised $12.5 million in a series B round of funding led by Foundry Group, with participation from Teamworthy Ventures, Venrock, and Next Frontier Capital. Quiq had raised $6.5 million in a series A round of funding way back in 2016.

In the CXTech landscape I’m putting together they fall into the Business Messaging category, which use messaging APIs as well as offer their own aggregated messaging services sometimes through APIs to businesses.

We’ll likely see more acquisitions and investment in this category as customer service platforms consolidate such business messaging functions, e.g. Zendesk buying Smooch, as mentioned in the CXTech Week 22 newsletter. There are loads (hundreds) of business messaging providers, many focus at a country and even city level, as its all about business customer relationships. I’ll share more on the CXTech landscape at TADSummit Americas and TADSummit EMEA.

 

Account Security is Important and Surprisingly Simple

The Capital One data breach means for 100M Americans and 6M Canadians their personal data is not that personal anymore. But there are simple remedies. I’ve mentioned this one previously in the CXTech newsletters: Google showed that an SMS code sent to a recovery phone number helped block 100% of automated bots, 96% of bulk phishing attacks, and 76% of targeted attacks.

Telesign at TADSummit Americas and TADSummit EMEA will explore this topic in much more detail and discussion the opportunities for all CXTech companies to partner with them, to help improve customer experiences around account security.

Payfone do not fall into the CPaaS category, rather online security / trust ratings. However, it does use telecom APIs in determining the trust ratings. They fall into the customer communications category of CXTech, as one of the enabling technologies.

Payfone’s Adaptive Orchestration is a real-time measure of identity confidence for those consumers who cannot be immediately passed because their Trust Score is too low, or whose use case requires multi-factor authentication, thus requiring further investigation. With Adaptive Orchestration, additional methods such as ‘take a selfie’ can be used to inform the Trust Score in real time. This process may be used to further verify consumers with Trust Scores between 300-630 who may be legitimate but are showing unusual behavior.

Thomas Howe discussed this at TADSummit last year, and will be going much deeper at TADSummit Americas in the “Evolution in Customer Service Communication” session. BTW, we’ve added Tony Jamous, previously President at Nexmo, the Vonage API Platform, currently investor and advisor, to the panel discussion in this session.

 

Leading innovators meet at TADSummit EMEA

We have an exciting “Industry Innovation Panel” at the end of Day 1 (19th Nov) of TADSummit EMEA. Including:

  • Maarten Ectors, Chief Innovation Officer at Legal & General
  • Professor Alistair Moore, UCL School of Management
  • Steve Goodwin, Marquis de Geek
  • Matt Millar, serial entrepreneur, Founder Uplift (solving expensive consumer debt)
  • Miles Cheetham, Head of Propositions at OPEN BANKING (entity set up by the UK Competition and Markets Authority)

The audience will be a who’s who of proven innovators in programmable telecoms including Tony Jamous (previously President at Nexmo, the Vonage API Platform, currently investor and advisor), Simon Woodhead (CEO at Simwood Group PLC), Gavin Henry (CEO, SureVoIP), Jérôme Pascal (CEO at Wazo), Marten Schoenherr (CEO/Founder at Automat Berlin GmbH), and Ahmed Murad (Founder, Director, SiPalto Ltd) to name just a few. TADSummit EMEA is going to be a very special event.

I saw this great article giving well-deserved props to Maarten Ectors, providing further testament the innovative line-up we have planned at TADSummit EMEA.

 

TADSummit Americas and TADSummit EMEA keep on growing

We have very exciting panel session planned for TADSummit EMEA: The Status and Future of CXTech

After TADSummit last year we created the term CXTech to better capture the breadth of programmable telecoms. CXTech: the C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers. We view this broader category as the future state of the industry. This panel will discuss the current status and possible future states of CXTech.

Panelists:

  • Jérôme Pascal, CEO, Wazo
  • Tony Jamous, previously President at Nexmo, the Vonage API Platform, currently investor and advisor
  • Jonathan Grant, CEO Babl.biz and CEO Speakserve, previously CEO NewVoiceMedia
  • David Walsh, CEO VoIP Innovations
  • Rob Pickering, Founder and CEO Aplisay
  • Ravish Patel, Director of Products, Telesign

Questions:

  • Has the industry lost its way? Given the jabber on APIs, AI, Digital, Transformation, Video, AR/VR, Blockchain, Contextual Comms, Cloud Comms, XaaS, etc.
  • What are the greatest challenges facing CXTech wrt enterprise adoption?
  • What’s your prognosis for the spate of CPaaS acquisitions over the past few years?
  • Will UCaaS ever achieve its dream of becoming THE enterprise communications platform?
  • How will customer communications evolve? Currently it looks like lots of neat ideas, and a big integration headache.
  • Omnichannel is dead! The goal is not to be everywhere, nor is it to be seamless or unified. Those are necessary, but they are not sufficient. How can the CXTech industry deliver harmonized customer experiences. For example, a flight delay notification results in a push message so my airline’s app can fire up with other flight options, while an on-time notification is sent by SMS, and all the bloody email notifications stop!

AND at TADSummit Americas we’ll also be joined by Terry Hsiao, Entrepreneur, Advisor, Investor, and Head of Strategy at Kaleyra on the panel “Closing the Gap with Twilio, What CPaaS Providers Need To Do.” I’ve written about Kaleyra in CXTech Week 9, they bought Hook Mobile which Terry ran.

 

TADHack Netherlands is Back!

We’ve just launched TADHack Netherland. This year it will be based in Rotterdam. A big thank you to KPN API Store for making this possible.

 

Slack was down again in July

As mentioned in CXTech News Week 28, this isn’t that unusual, as you can see here.

And is yet another reason why diversity in messaging matters. Hence the federation made possible by Mio to support multiple enterprise messaging platforms. With Matrix providing the long term decentralized / federated solution.

 

eCPaaS: Power of CPaaS conquering the enterprise communication landscape

A nice article from hSenid Mobile on eCPaaS. You’ll be able to hack on their eCPaaS at TADHack Chicago in October. And see the hacks created and listen to CEO of hSenid Mobile, Dinesh Saparamadu, present on eCPaaS at TADSummit Americas.

 

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Congratulations to Brian McManus, 13 years heading up Analyst Relations for Amdocs. I’ve known him since he led marketing at Teltier back in 2000.

Congratulations to Eric Horesnyi, who is now General Manager, API & Integration at Axway. Axway bought Streamdata.io a few months ago.

Robert Jones is now Head of Business and Product Development at Rakuten Mobile, Inc. I’ve known Rob since his days in Dynamicsoft (they bought Teltier) which was then was bought by Cisco.

Heather Baden is now Product Manager – Partnerships & Integrations at Nexmo, the Vonage API Platform. I’ve known Heather since her time at Telstra setting up their developer community.

Congrats to Avi Forchheimer who is now an Associate at JVP. I’ve known Avi since his time at Voxbone, and then with TelAPI, which became Zang in Avaya.

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