Episode released on: 26. June 2023
Sponsored by: https://messente.com/
Mastering Multichannel Engagement with Uku Tomikas, CEO Messente – THE CX GOALKEEPER – Transformation, Customer Experience, and Leadership Goals
The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Uku Tomikas
LinkedIn Headline: Delivering reliable and secure business messaging while fighting fraud! Hit me up and let’s talk #businessmessaging #SMS #Viber #RCS #Whatsapp
Highlights:
00:00 Game Start
00:28 Uku’s Introduction
04:29 Uku’s Value
06:27 Messente’s Value Prop
09:20 Messaging Platforms
11:27 The Messente Platform
15:41 Engagement Rate
21:12 Case Study
24:44 CEO Key Learnings
26:43 Book Suggestion
27:41 Contact Details
28:53 Golden Nuggets
and much more
Uku’s Contact Details:
His book suggestion:
- Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Uku’s Golden Nuggets:
- ”Use client communication, use business messaging in your customer communication. If you’re not using it, you’re missing out on open rate, reach, cost per click (…) The stats are massive, and it can have such a large impact on your business. Don’t be afraid of it, people expect you to be able to message them.”
… on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast
Tweet
#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #cxtransformation #podcast
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What did we discuss?
Gregorio Uglioni
Ladies and gentleman welcome to the CX goalkeeper podcast your host, Greg will have smart discussions with friends, experts and thought leaders on customer experience transformation and leadership. Please follow this podcast on your preferred platform. I am sure you will enjoy the next episode with the guest I selected for you.
This episode is brought to you by Messente.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the next episode of The CX goalkeeper Podcast. I’m very thrilled today because I’m going to discuss with Uku Tomikas from Messente, all about this technology and the value that the Messente can bring to the customer. And therefore, let’s really kick off this discussion. Today’s top player is Uku. Uku, could you please introduce yourself?
Uku Tomikas
Yeah, so my name is Uku Tomikas I am the CEO and shareholder of Messente communications. As a person, and as a CEO, and everything I do, I consider myself a grinder, for example, this is actually a very moment, day for me in a way because to illustrate how I’m a grinder today was the 1,000th day in a row that I did yoga every single morning. So for 1000 days, in a row, every single day, I’ve practiced yoga and gotten there. And I think that that’s kind of the best description of my personal values as well. It’s that consistent persistence in doing things over and over and over again, that drives real results in the long run. It’s not about the first sprint, you do. It’s not about the week that you burn yourself out. It’s day after day, year after here, hitting those marks and hitting those tasks that you need to do that get a business there. And it’s the same thing in my professional life. I’ve had a very, very career I’ve been a military commander have been a high school teacher, a volunteer firefighter. I’ve sold almonds in a streetcar on the streets of Tallinn in green tights and curled up shoes. So I’ve been through it all. And I started the MS Center as a junior salesman seven years ago. It was an SDR not even an account manager but started as an SDR just finding clients. And through seven years, I’ve worked myself up from that position, day in day out to the CEO and shareholder of that very same company today. So that’s, that’s who I am. I’m a hard worker, a grinder to consider myself not very talented, but an ability to consistently learn and help in perspectives of leadership, strategy, sales, etc. So that’s me in a nutshell, in a way.
Gregorio Uglioni
I would say congratulation for for your, your background, the big question that I would have is now is, do you have time also to sleep?
Uku Tomikas
Yes, that’s a question I very often get. That’s actually one of the things I prioritize. So I’ve done a few sort of presentations on the topic as well of building per citizen, CNC doing things like that. And the main principle that I always talk about, and always give people in this regard, as well as that, it’s not important how much you do, it’s that you do, like, that’s the most important thing, five minutes is enough that you can do half an hour tomorrow, if you only have time for five minutes today. But it’s very important to also rest and make sure that you don’t burn out because I’ve already gone through burnout once and that was specifically for that reason of trying to do everything at maximum at the same time. And it just isn’t sustainable. Sometimes it’s more important to just find joy in doing little, you know, I’m still a volunteer firefighter, but don’t have the time to go on call. Because the calls for like 12 hour calls, for example, I don’t have the time for it. But I help with things like sometimes event organization, I help with, you know, the communication within the actual organization, I help facilitate emergency alerts through through my center as well. So there are ways you can contribute without needing to do the maximum, but you’re still a part of it, you’re still contributing, you’re still you’re still making something better. So it’s important to find ways how you can contribute, and then make it work with your time. I also have two small kids, and I train myself and etc, etc. So there’s a million things to do simultaneously. But it’s more important that I focus on getting a little bit out of everything, and focusing on my main things more, rather than trying to do maximum everywhere burning out being a, you know, part of my friends, but a shitty husband, a shitty father and a shitty business leader at the same time, right? You know, pick fuel and be good at those.
Gregorio Uglioni
And what you’re saying is extremely interesting, because everybody else has a lot of different roles in our lives, founder, businessman, brand and so on. But then the thing that we always need to keep care we need to care about are our values and perhaps which values drive you in life.
Uku Tomikas
Persistence domain, I usually am not a big fan of quotes, but there’s one that I even have a snippet of a tattooed on my arm right here, which is press on which is persistence in detail. germination alone are omnipotent, nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. That’s the first thing. The second thing is honesty. Honesty is always the best policy. Honesty can hurt. Honesty can be painful. Honesty can be uncomfortable. But it’s always the best principle in business, especially instead of trying to sell somebody on something that you don’t have or, you know, try to mask things that are even if you mess up to say you did, most people will respect you more when you’re honest. And when you say you make mistakes, because no one expects you to be perfect, but people expect you to be honest. So honesty is the second thing. And the third thing is being courageous. And the expression of that the practical expression of that is saying, yes, if someone comes up to you with a proposition Hey, do you want to speak about this? Hey, do you want to try this thing? Do you want to go climbing? Do you want to go golfing? Do you want to go? Knitting? Whatever, right? Just say yes, try it, try it be courageous enough to try things for the very first time, and you will see so much more light come into your life as well, so many more experiences, that builds you into a much more stronger, more courageous and more multifaceted person in a way. So those those three things, persistence, honesty, and courage, courage are my main three values for myself specific,
Gregorio Uglioni
why they were interesting persistence, honesty, and courage. I think these are also the values that you leverage to create a center, you are the CEO of Messente let’s introduce what you’re doing, what’s your value proposition at Messente
Uku Tomikas
Messente is a business messaging company, what we do is help companies delivered their business critical communication, say you are a parcel delivery company, say you’re DHL, who you work with as well. And you send parcel delivery notifications, you buy something on Amazon, you want it into a parcel locker, and we send that notification for them. What happens there is the alternative cost of an undelivered SMS is super high, because if a person doesn’t pick up that package, it’s brought into reprocessing, they have to go through all of that process and send it out again, the extra cost of that is usually about you know, in Euro, it’s about 50 euros per package per single package. And they send hundreds of 1000s of packages every month, which means hundreds of 1000s of messages every month. And if you can improve the delivery of those messages by just 1%, get it to 1000 more people, that’s 1000 more packages delivered, and times that by the amount, what you’re saving 50,000 60,000 euros of actual value gains. So it’s less about the the cost of the tool and more about the value that you can bring. And we focus on making sure that the delivery is super, super high. And that’s why we also work in Estonia and globally as well with a lot of different companies and the financial services departments. Unicorns like very, for example, who are no your customers seen as cybersecurity companies, logistics companies, anybody where that’s important that throughout the ages has led us to the point where yesterday I was at a meeting with the Estonian banking associations anti fraud group, because in the Estonian market, we’re helping banks fight messaging fraud, and taking the lead and networking with operators to Estonia and police, the bank’s trying to make sure that this channel is kept as clean, and as honest as possible, right. So that’s what we do, we’re very much hands on company focused on helping our customers helping the industry, making it as clean and as safe and as anti fraud as possible, while simultaneously delivering a very reliable and very secure service for business messaging needs. So your client communication can be as effective as possible. But simultaneously, not just making sure that you know, when you work with us, your business is good. But also we’re protected, protecting your interests outside of that to making sure that other malicious actors aren’t using your name abusing your clients and doing that. So for us, that’s also important. It’s not just the work that we do together, but what we can do in the industry for you and how we can protect and advocate for your interest within this industry in this business messaging scene.
Gregorio Uglioni
I think secure security, as you mentioned, is the foundation of trust, creating trust trustful relationship. And as a normal person, I am always using messaging platforms, and therefore what would be my next questions. As a human being in the human to human interactions. I always use messaging platforms. And now also companies in the b2c world are using that. What’s your view, what are the development there?
Uku Tomikas
So a lot more companies are seeing the value in that. Unfortunately, there are still less companies using business messaging for their client communication than there probably should be. We’re only talking about five to 7% of the companies in the world are Using business messaging as a part of their client communication, sort of infrastructure or the way they do it, and quite often the problem is that companies see it from an angle of, it’s either this or that either use email or use text messaging, or I’ll use a chat app or something like that. But in truth, these days, you should be talking to our clients in an omni channel, we’d be where your clients are. But we’re seeing a transition into that. So I’ll draw you an example from Pocky standard, which is one of my most interesting case studies where clients are in the clients, in this case, our banks, for example, who we work with, they are moving away from using their native apps to a banking app. And moving on to WhatsApp because you can do basic banking through a whatsapp chat. Now, you’ll have an official chat with your actual customer through your WhatsApp account. And they can do basic banking there. And what this means is that banks no longer have the additional costs of driving people to use their app, nor have the app maintenance costs, etc. They can do basic banking, and then they can do basic customer interactions through a messaging platform. That’s already on everybody’s phone. Anyways, you know, WhatsApp has an immense market penetration and what’s in Pakistan. You know, pretty much everybody has that, right. And there are more markets, right that. So we’re seeing a transition into using business messaging on a much more broader scale for customer communication, and using it in many different instances to make it as successful as possible.
Gregorio Uglioni
And I think what you’re saying is extremely interesting, because I have on my mobile phone more than 50 apps, I don’t know which one. And I remember only ones that are connecting with me trying to continue to contact me. But at the end, one of the apps that I use the most are the messaging and the messenger apps. And if I can do my business there, I know it works out. I know, everything there. And therefore I can move myself extremely quickly. And not in every time in a different app where everybody’s thinking it’s the best UI possible. But it’s different from the others. And everybody, every time I need to I need to adapt. I think you leverage already won one great example, let’s bid Understand, understand a bit better the power of your platform, could you please share how you leverage your your plattform for your customers.
Speaker 2
So what we help them do is create a single point of contact, usually an API for them to be able to send to anywhere in the world, say you’re a bank within the north of Europe, you probably have 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 markets, or you’re a company like Veriff, that works in 197 markets, instead of trying to find an aggregator in every market or working with every operator in every market, you have a single API that you can then distribute customer communication to everywhere in the world. And what we then do is when we leverage the analytics and reporting we see on our side and combine it with the CRM data that the client sees, and then we show them Okay, so adjust this here, we can probably probably make the content better here, we can probably adjust the URL to make sure that it’s better whitelisted, though, so it goes through. So we do a lot of hands on work with the clients to ensure that they’re, they’re getting the maximum out of this channel as well. So this is the hands on approach that we take. So they’re using the platform to deliver to everywhere in the world as reliably as possible. And then we use our knowledge and our expertise within this field, to then advocate and make them you know, more successful in the business that they do. But then also help them on the anti fraud fraud, you know, using their what we know their template is and seeing anything that tries to use anything similar or tries to use their name for it will blacklisted will advocate with other providers and other operators to blacklisted as well. So it’s all of that plus, one of the coolest vehicles that we’ve used for one of the bigger sort of new up and coming financial service providers in Estonia, that’s more of like a neobank. These days. They have 40 markets where they actively working, and they want to send OTP codes, pretty much transactional confirmations for for downloading the app and creating an account but for certain transactions as well. And to do so, we built a custom vehicle are usually in the messaging scene. If you want to launch a market like even a market like Bulgaria, for example, or Bulgaria or if you want to launch a market like Saudi Arabia, the registration process is super lengthy, because they require a lot of documents that require you to sometimes have a physical entity there. They require so much more in order to actually get you going through the process of I want to launch 40 markets takes six months just port for purely documentation site. So what we did was we created a specific piece of software, a piece a tool for ourselves, then we registered it globally. So we created a global brand for ourselves that works across any messaging app, most of the major ones at least in any market in terms of SMS as well, which means that if you want to start sending business critical ot piece tomorrow, you can do so globally. And that speeds up the time for any business that actually wants to get going. And for them, it meant that instead of waiting six months to launch a new market, they just tell us, hey, we want to launch, you know, Vietnam tomorrow, like, cool, we’ll set it up. Usually, it will take months upon months to do so. So we can also speed up the flow of client communication help companies launch faster, because a big part of launching any market is customer communication. You might have the database, you might have the contacts, how are you going to reach them? How are you going to engage with them? How do you get them going? And this is where we help them getting going as fast as possible.
Gregorio Uglioni
It’s extremely interesting. Only for information for the audience. OTP means one time password, only that everybody’s aware of this shortening of this of this of these word. I think it’s extremely interesting what what you’re saying. Because speed is the key differentiator, differentiator. Nowadays, everybody’s a new day, and then it needs to bring it quick on the market. And this but this platform, it’s really interesting and helpful to launch in the different markets. But seeing that from the customer point of view, it means that they “c” of the b2c basically. And you have international experience with a lot of countries. You mentioned Asia, you mentioned Europe, I’m sure you’re also active in the USA. And they’re How are the customer reacting on these messages when they are getting the messages is still something that they want to use? I’ll do do they react? And perhaps we have also some hints out to increase the engagement rate on that? Yeah, absolutely.
Uku Tomikas
There’s a lot of fun stats about business messaging. One of my favorite ones, of course, is that the recent recent research done by Forrester was that more than 70% of customers expect companies to be able to talk to them via messages via business messaging, right? There are things to be aware of email is an SMS, it works differently. It also works significantly more effective if you use it well. We’re seeing CTR rates anywhere. So click through rates of anywhere between 19 and 45%, sometimes even above, compared to just in comparison to 3% on Google ads. And then if you take into consideration cost per click cost per click, considering average messaging prices in the world is anywhere between 10 cents and 40 cents per click. And on Google ads, it’s between two and $4 per click. So you’re talking about a tool that if you just put the math into it, it’s nine times more effective and 15 times cheaper, right. So in that sense, it’s a tool that makes a lot of sense, customers do expect you to be able to facilitate customer communication through dawn. But it is something that you have to be careful with. You cannot over saturate the main reason that people unsubscribe, interestingly enough, is not because they didn’t opt in in the first place. Only 16% of people opt out of business messaging because they didn’t opt in in the first place. 74% opt out, because you’re sending too much. There’s a limit. So most business practices will say that, especially if you’re doing more promotional content as compared to transactional content that they already expect and are used to. And promotional content should be not more than about four to two to four times per month, not more than that. And you have to make sure that every single time you communicate with your client through business messaging, you’re delivering value. But these days, SMS has a very strong stat, for example, 98% open rate within the five minutes massive, but customer experience and how people are interacting with those messages is also changing. One of the things that has changed a lot is previously we would look into the message and we click on it. But these days, we gloves will pull down the notification bar and we’ll see what it actually says. Which means that the hook of that customer communication, whatever you’re trying to do, needs to be within the space of that notification bar that needs to be your hook. So you need to be aware of these types of things and business messaging as well to make it as effective as possible. To understand how it works. It needs to be very short, very to the point and segmented as well. Like I’ll draw an example if you’re a b2b company instead of a b2c company, like mostly everybody talks about b2c uses business messaging, but it’s usable in b2b as well. Let’s say that you’re a company that deserves to deliver some sort of a software as a products or your sauce company. And you are launching a new product that is specifically designed for one of the customer buying portfolios that you have saved marketers. If you have that portfolio, they have expressed interest in this pipe piece of toolset, then they’ve seen value in this before. Why not communicated by a text message that hey, this thing is lying. Here’s a link go check it out type of deal. So it’s very useful, but it’s important to understand that it needs to be value driven communication needs to be value driven. And value isn’t just a discount value is the information you provide value is the actual real client impact you give. Just because you give a discount doesn’t mean that it’s its value. And then it’s also in discounts in understanding how you give discounts. Because depending on the size of the average invoice or the average purchase, you see from from your customers, you need to take into consider is $1 discount, more effective or percentile discount, so 10 euros off versus 10% off, which one of those two is more effective and the client perspective and if it’s, if your average purchase his say 50 euros and probably 10 euros off is more effective than 10% off. But if it is 200 euros and 10 euros is probably less effective than let’s say 5%, because you already calculated in your head, what would be the most effective one. So it’s this idea of understanding specifically how to drive this customer communication and then that that’s where this hands on approach comes into play. Most companies don’t know all of these stats don’t know all of these nuances to customer communication. But you need to advise them and help them to make the most out of this channel. And then it is supremely effective.
Gregorio Uglioni
It’s super interesting what you’re saying. And to make it a bit more even more tangible for the audience. Do you have perhaps an example or a use case that you can share with us what you implemented that was extremely successful.
Uku Tomikas
One of the best things we’ve ever done that has helped with some conversion rate, specifically getting clients to convert more, has been the advocacy to not use, because most companies want to use shortlands and messaging because essentially, you’re paying essentially for every character. And when you go over 160 You’re paying for two messages. Everybody uses shorteners, and most go for tiny URL, most go for Bitly go for stuff like that. But the problem with those is that those are very little trusted, because those are also used for scams. So one of the first things that we started teaching companies is use branded short links in your communication. Whenever you do make sure it’s associated with your brand, make sure that it’s always homogenous, that you’re not switching up links that you’re trying are trying to do everything else. Your links these days are also a part of your brand. Because people need to trust the content you’re delivering. So that has been one of the first things that we’ve always advocated towards people having. And the second very, very specific use cases, we have a client who works in Bulgaria and Vietnam. Interestingly enough, they seem to be quite similar markets for them. And in Bulgaria. and Vietnam. Viper is a very popular chat app to use, not WhatsApp, not messenger, Facebook Messenger, they mainly use Viper for for communication between each other. And they used to use SMS for their marketing purposes, essentially having a campaign and we suggested why not go over to fiber fiber is a more rich channel. People are there more, they’re kind of more used to that channel in their everyday communication. So why not switch up to Viper on Viber. You can do more fancy stuff as well. You can do carousels you can send videos media of call to action buttons, instead of just links to click so it’s more interactive. And when they did a head to head comparison between a fiber campaign and then an SMS campaign that were quite similar in their effect, not even having all the bells and whistles on the rich communication side, they saw a three times higher conversion rate per conversion rate compared to SMS that already has a high conversion rate in terms of you know, bringing clients on board and actually getting those promotions to be effective, but then getting a 3x increase on a rich channel because it was used correctly. And so that’s one of the bigger success stories we’ve had. And that’s what we always reference as well, you know, go rich first. For example, markets such as Saudi Arabia for us for whatsapp first. So we always go deliver WhatsApp first every message whether it’s an a one time passcode, or a reminder or a transaction or promotional message, we will deliver it WhatsApp first, because that’s where people are used to being. And then if they happen to not have a WhatsApp account, we’ll switch it over to using SMS. And that again, for especially for use cases where you’re trying to get Dortmund clients to start using the app again. So reactivation essentially, for those using bridge communication has been two to four times more effective than using just business messaging, which already is very effective in getting Dortmund clients to come back to your app, come back to actually using your service. So those are few of the sort of more practical use cases that we’ve seen where real success has been seen by taking these proactive steps and building the business and customer communication through that angle.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much as a CEO of Messente, which are the 1,2 or 3 key learnings that you would like to share with with companies.
Uku Tomikas
That’s a good one. First, don’t be afraid to Use messaging in customer communication. Use it, it’s a super vital tool and a very, very effective tool in using it. So do try it. Second, learn how to use that tool as effectively as possible for every use case where it does business messaging has a variety of places where you can put it in your customer lifecycle between, you know, sign up greetings, reminders, appointment reminders, payment reminders, promotions, one time, pass codes, transactional confirmations, whatever, there are a whole host of places you could use it. So try around the different places and see where it might have the biggest effect for you. So effectively a B test. Thirdly, goal rich First, use rich messaging. Everybody these days expect the customer experience to be varied to be easy to be engaging, to do so rich channels are more effective, because they create a more appealing experience for the customer at the other end. And even if you think that, for example, a OTT platform might not have a large reach in a market say that, you know, library only has 30% reach or have WhatsApp only has 20% reach. Think of it from this perspective. Even small TV channels, get ads. And their market penetration is significantly lower than 20 to 40%. But even they got ads, and even that’s effective. So think of what you could do with 20 to 40% market share from that front as well. So those are my three things. Don’t be afraid to use it, use it as much as possible, find the places where it’s most effective and play around with a tested and call rich first. I think those are the three things that I would give us takeaways for people.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. This discussion is game is coming to an end, we are in the extra time. And I still have three question for you. Is there a book that you would like to suggest to the audience that asked you during your career or during your personal life?
Uku Tomikas
My favorite book of all time that I always just everybody is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and ego Turski. It is one of the best books in terms of understanding how you think and what are the mistakes you make and thinking, you know, sunken cost fallacy, for example, is always one of my favorite ones. Or the other one, the other principle that I always come back to is what you see is all there is? In other words, what you don’t know you don’t know. So broadening your horizons is what makes you make better decisions. Because you always think you know, everything, but you don’t, you’re missing a lot of stuff. So that book is something that I always recommend to absolutely everybody to read to reread, I predict at least once a year to make sure that I’m still reminding myself of those concepts and making sure that I apply them to my personal life and business life as well.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you, this is great suggestion. And what’s the best way to contact you?
Speaker 2
The best way to contact me is always through LinkedIn. I’m very very active there. Just find me love first name, last name so Uku Tomikas , you can always find me there hit me up, especially if you have any questions about how to use business messaging, what are like prices for specific markets, how I go about business and how I go about client communication? If you have any specific questions or even general questions, find me there talk to me, that’s the best way to get in contact with me personal
Gregorio Uglioni
thank you and how to find Messente
Speaker 2
Messente is quite simple to find as well. Messente.com, you can sign up create yourself a free account, start sending messages. And yeah, you’ll have all the contact details from the actual account itself. Signing up is free. So just try it out, send some messages and see how it works.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. And now we are coming to the last question is Uku’s Golden Nugget. It’s something that we discussed or something new that you would like to leave to the audience.
Uku Tomikas
So I think the golden nugget, the most important thing is use client communication, use business messaging in your customer communication if you’re not using it so far. Because if you’re not using it, you’re missing out on the open rate, the reach the cost per click the click through rates, etc. The stats that are massive for that particular channel that can have such a large impact on your business. Use it, try it. Don’t be afraid of it, people expect you to be able to message them.
Gregorio Uglioni
Thank you very much. Oh cool. Please stay with me and to the audience for today. It’s everything. I hope that you enjoyed this discussion. If you have any feedback, please let us know. Contact Uku for any questions. Thank you very much. Bye bye.
Uku Tomikas
Thank you, goodbye
Gregorio Uglioni
if you enjoyed this episode, please share the word of mouth. Subscribe it, share it until the next episode. Please don’t forget, we are not in a b2b or b2c business. You’re in a human to human environment. Thank you
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