Anurag Aggarwal, Chief Growth Officer Globe Teleservices shares his takeaways from a recent panel he appeared on at MEF CONNECTS Omnichannel, where a group of experts discussed the latest developments in protecting consumers’ digital lives in an omnichannel world.
The final panel session of the MEF Connects Omnichannel event focused on “Consumer Protection: The Necessity of an Integrated Lifecycle Approach”. This session really helped bring everything together that the event talked about within the world of omnichannel. At the end of the day, for the industry to succeed, the quintessential element is TRUST and subscribers needing to feel that TRUST!
The discussion kickstarted with the moderator James Williams, Director of Programmes MEF highlight that – like in other industries – there is a life cycle attached to customers from beginning to end and this circle never ends because once a brand has a customer, they want to retain that customer and earning that trust can quite often take a long time but losing their trust can happen within an absolute instance and so there’s a real necessity for an integrated approach to the customer life cycle, verification and trust!
John Bruner, CEO Aegis (interestingly named after the Greek term for the shield of Zeus having ‘special properties to protect’) highlighted how the company has been around for about 17 years and started in the premium SMS space of providing life cycle compliance services wherein they would intercept live advertising and live opt-in experiences for premium SMS in the US market and evaluate them for compliance and find the “bad actors” needing to be shut down.
Eventually, they realized the need to create a Campaign Registry Platform to vet Brands and evaluate their campaigns for compliance before they went live as well as scrutinizing transaction data and detecting anomalies in the patterns. The data collected could be tied back to a campaign and eventually a brand, which further helped create “bad guy databases” that prevented these brands from coming back and causing fraud.
Eventually, John advocated a life cycle approach where all great technologies that exist to protect consumers should come together and communicate amongst each other because there’s power in leveraging that data.
Catherine Maguire, Product Manager British Telecom, further added about how the operators in UK are coming together as a combined force to tackle the issue of fraud with an anti-trust philosophy.
As per Catherine, fraud does seem to be a subject that’s at the forefront of organizations priorities with consumers also being much more aware of fraudulent activities and it is a civic responsibility to provide these services in a clean manner.
Further, operators are determined to make channels such as RBM and RCS safe and are learning from mistakes that might have taken place in the SMS world.
Even though the channel is free, there is a need to balance right between spam/scam prevention of the consumers that put their trust in the Operators as well as making the channel profitable. Anurag Aggarwal, Chief Growth Officer at Globe Teleservices further introduced an Indian angle wherein literally a Netflix series have been created to highlight the burgeoning issue of scams and frauds using Messaging and Voice channels.
The regulator’s intervention by introducing blockchain-based Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) was a move in that direction to bring all members of the ecosystem together on a common platform i.e the Enterprises, Telemarketers and Aggregators, Operators as well as the Regulators.
Carlos Villanueva, Co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer Enabld touched upon the efforts being made by their company to bring the Telco players into the SaaS ecosystem and how their KYX solution is helping enterprises and retailers by providing an API to validate Brands, Enterprises and End-Customers that are going to use their messaging services.
The discussion further expanded into aspects around the 10DLC regime in the US, actions undertaken by the likes of WhatsApp Business to build trust with new businesses getting onboarded and what efforts can be made by the industry to provide Small & Medium Businesses (SMBs) the right tools and access to benefit from the overall CPaaS ecosystem, while keeping the element of TRUST intact!
MEF CONNECTS Omnichannel – watch on demand
MEF Members met in London last week for our fully hybrid (face-to-face and virtual) Business Messaging related event for 2022 – MEF CONNECTS Omnichannel. Taking place at The Kings Fund  in London, Members and guests gathered to review Omnichannel strategies, build new partnerships, identify new target audiences for goods and services, integrate new ideas and expand their knowledge of this fast-growing area.
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