AiThority Interview with Matt Ramerman, President at Sinch for Marketing

Please tell us about your role and the team / technology you handle at Sinch. How did you arrive at Sinch?

As president of Sinch for Marketing, I lead a talented team focused on creating technologies that will transform customer relationships by helping enterprises make the paradigm shift from one-way to two-way or conversational marketing. We do this by making communications more personalized and relevant through high-engagement mediums such as video and rich messaging as well as leveraging conversational AI across mobile to drive high engagement. I was previously CEO and co-founder of Vehicle, a personalized video and rich media messaging technology company that was acquired by Sinch in 2018. Prior to my time at Vehicle, I served as a principal at one of the largest privately held full-service agencies in the U.S., working with iconic brands such as AT&T, T-Mobile, HTC and Microsoft.

What does your product / service offering look like?

Sinch for Marketing is an expert on mobile customer engagement.  Our mission is to evangelize and drive the adoption and utilization of the Sinch product portfolio with CMOs worldwide. Part of Sinch, a global leader in cloud communications for mobile customer engagement, Sinch for Marketing helps brands strengthen their relationships with their customers via their mobile messaging channels. This is done through a bespoke combination of Sinch’s next-generation mobile messaging technologies, such as our industry leading Engage Campaign Platform that delivers personalized messaging through video and rich media, two-way Natural Language Processed AI and live chat to call center.

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What Is the most contemporary definition of Mobile messaging experience and what kind of computing prowess does a company showcase to meet customer demands in this industry?

The messaging channel is now delivering an app-like experience as consumers’ most used, most common channel of integration. It is crucial for brands to provide customers with an always-on, personalized and relevant two-way mobile messaging experience. Not only do brands need to be reachable on all mobile channels where customers are, but they need to provide customers with timely service on those channels at any time of day. This can sound overwhelming, but through the use of technology through two-way messaging, companies can create an on-demand messaging solution that can answer frequently asked customer inquiries outside of business hours, and pass customers off to live agents during business hours when necessary.

Conversation APIs can enable companies to activate a wide variety of mobile messaging channels for two-way brand messaging without requiring agents to operate each of these channels separately; rather, they can access customer conversations on various channels from a single platform. Some of these APIs can even store customer context and history, allowing brands to craft personalized messages and offers and deliver them at the right time.

By incorporating a more customer-centric approach to marketing, brands can successfully drive higher engagement, deliver a more personalized, tailored experience and sell more products while driving higher consumer satisfaction.

Could you tell us more about the current trends in AI-powered Mobile Marketing? How does Sinch influence the martech industry with its services?

One of the biggest trends we’re seeing in AI/ML that impacts the mobile marketing space is increased adoption of chatbots equipped with Natural Language Processing (NLP), a branch of AI which gives computers the ability to understand, write and speak languages like humans do. NLP utilizes machine learning to enhance web and mobile chatbots’ ability to understand the topic of a text and find the answer to an inquiry, in more than 100 languages. This has sweeping impacts on mobile marketing. With NLP-equipped chatbots, brands can provide customers with always-on service, no matter what language they prefer — boosting accessibility and a brand’s global reach. 

Our SaaS platform, Chatlayer.ai, enables business users to build and maintain NLP-fluent enterprise AI chat and voice bots in 100+ languages. Furthermore, Chatlayer.ai is a low-code platform, which means that companies don’t need to hire a developer team to utilize a chatbot, saving both ramp-up time and costs.

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Pandemic Era Management 

How has your role evolved through the pandemic crisis? How did you stay on top of your game?

Business has accelerated during the last twelve months, with enterprise digital adoption rate skyrocketing. Working remotely with internal teams as well as with customers has presented new challenges in terms of driving collaboration and maintaining morale. It has been awesome to see how quickly we have adapted to the new work environment, and have found ways to be more productive while fostering a stronger sense of culture and community.

One lesson you learned by working with technology and people during the pandemic?

The biggest lesson for me has been the reality that we don’t need to travel as much as we thought, and that we can meet in-person less without compromising customer experience, service or the quality of the solutions we deliver.

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Insights

How would you define ‘responsible marketing’ in the pandemic era through the lens of a general customer? 

Amid the pandemic, customers are inundated with digital communications from brands. “Responsible marketing” in this era means leaning into customer preferences and purchase history to provide them with personalized, relevant communications at the right time, and on the right channel. One way of achieving this is through “conversational marketing,” the process of activating two-way channels (e.g., SMS, or messaging apps such as Instagram or WhatsApp) to support marketing campaigns and programs so consumers can respond to outbound communications. This shifts away from the traditional model of marketing — one-way, spray-and-pray campaigns that cater to the common denominator rather than individual customers — and provides the customer with more tailored messages and personalized dialogues. 

Tag a person in the industry whose answers you would like to see here:

Jeff Nienaber, a digital advertising expert at Microsoft.

Thank you, Matt! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.