Interview with Michael Power, Founder of Aablar

We wanted to talk about the history and background of your project. It's been said that it started as a way to help one of your friends…

Yes, that’s correct. Our origins came from a conversation with a friend of mine who has cerebral palsy and finds it difficult to use traditional phone-based customer service. We realized that there needed to be an easier way to get in touch with brands, which led us to explore chat messaging channels, and then onto searching for these channels, and the frustration of that ultimately led us to create Aablar.

I've been working in the messaging space for nearly a decade, where a big part of my focus has been on leveraging new channels such as WhatsApp, RCS, Messenger, and even Twitter, to create great customer experiences through notifications, customer service, and conversational commerce.?

These channels are fantastic, but with the variety on offer it is a challenge for consumers to know which channel to contact a brand on to chat and get a response from a human when required.

When consumers are in the moment of wanting to buy something we have them covered with A2P, Instagram/Facebook, etc. But when they need to get customer service and chat with a business that's where things get more complicated. They either need to make a phone call to know which channel the brand is on so they can use the in-channel search or they need to Google and navigate a forest of FAQs or at best maybe get a web chat experience which resets every time you navigate away from the page. This isn't a convenient experience for someone who needs immediate help, like when their gas heating has failed, or their internet isn't working.

Aablar removes all the frustration and confusion by enabling consumers to go to aablar.com, search for the brand, click the chat button and start chatting with the brand's customer service team.

The name of your company seems to resemble the Spanish verb ‘hablar’ – to speak. So is it just a resemblance or is there a hidden meaning??

We're creating a service for people to speak with each other, so it resonates from that angle. We chose it because Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, competing with Chinese for the top spot.

We want to demonstrate that we're a company with English roots but designed for an international market. We're already launching in places like India, Mexico, Kenya and North America with a global approach. We're determined not to fall into the trap of focusing only on English-speaking communities.

One of the perks of a good company name is that if it starts with the letter ’A’ it ranks higher in all sorts of lists. Aablar goes even further with its two A’s. Is there a kind of intent here or just a coincidence?

It's a positive side effect, right? When we came up with the name we did joke that we would always be listed first with double ‘A’ at the beginning. As an aside, on our partner page, I auto-cycle the position of all the partners to ensure no one gets a prime place just because of their brand name.?

There are 5 major parties that play the great telecommunications game. There are end customers, there are brands, there are aggregators, operators and companies that develop CPaaS platforms. I wonder what kind of benefits and value can Aablar provide to all of these parties.

Let's start with customers. At Aablar, we have taken an approach that makes it easy for consumers to find a brand and chat with them on their preferred channel. Brands focus on different channels. And we enable consumers to choose which channel they prefer.

For brands, the value of our service is that it's an excellent way for them to boost exposure and SEO and most importantly: to be easily found and spoken to, generating an immediate positive customer service experience. Our platform has features that allow brands to modify their search tags and manage their position in the rankings.

Aggregators want to encourage more messaging, and we want to make it possible for consumers to start the conversation. Traditionally, our industry would call brands and remind them of events such as Black Friday to send messages to their customers. With P2A and customer service, the messages will flow when the consumers want, not when the aggregator reminds the brand to do a marketing send. The key to this though is the brand must know and believe that every interaction creates a commercial opportunity or improves their customer satisfaction and ultimately creates a better ROI than A2P alone.

Operators benefit from Aablar because we can give them a stage for RCS to be seen and used in countries where perhaps WhatsApp (or others) has become the dominant Channel. In Brazil and India for example, WhatsApp is particularly dominant but so is the Android Operating System which RCS is implemented on. If we rely on in-channel directories, then consumers will never have a reason to leave WhatsApp and the operators will face an uphill struggle. The strategy should be to increase the surfaces a brand can be found on, as opposed to putting all their hope on ‘in-channel’ search.

For CPaaS platform providers like Alaris, it's essential that they have many customers in the messaging world who use P2A products like Alaris mKit to sell new customer experiences.

This holistic approach drives the entire industry forward, benefiting consumers, platform providers, and everyone in between. More messages, better consumer experiences, and happier brands mean more money in the value chain.

How do you see the future of telecommunications? What trends do you spot? And how do you see yourself and Aablar in telecommunications in the future??

At the moment, we have a large push with WhatsApp. We need to focus on driving good functionality, good use cases, reliable services, and pricing that is reasonable. We also need to maintain a good view of the market to make sure we don't price ourselves out of different channels.

These different channel splits create some really interesting challenges for global players. If you look at North America, it’s all about SMS and MMS, while in Australia, there is a bit of Messenger. In Brazil, WhatsApp is the dominant platform. Eastern Europe, then Viber becomes more relevant and so on. The providers who are able to work this out at scale will benefit the most from these new platforms and use cases that consumers are driving.

Snapchat and Tiktok, either of which could become the channel of choice for the next generation. If Snapchat or any other channel that appeals to a large enough demographic appears in our business messaging and CPaaS platforms in the next few years, we will have to deal with it and respond to it.

That's why I think it's such an interesting marketplace to be in at the moment. New channels could drop tomorrow, meaning even more opportunities to create excellent consumer experiences.

What’s your opinion on AI in telecommunications?

AI is really interesting but it’s not new, for example my dev team were training AI models at Esendex half a decade ago. The difference with ChatGPT, Bard, etc is the speed with which we can go to market now.

AI will not be just a passing trend, and I think we're only now starting to see how it will impact our industry. Clearly chat bots but that's the obvious use case, what about using AI to make our tooling easier to use??

As an example I was talking to a peer on the future of CPaaS and their comment was “users can't even understand the tools we use today”... Maybe AI could help with creating chatbots, campaigns and using image generation to create appropriate images for rich cards, etc.

We’re just at the beginning and as ever it will be exciting to see the impact of this exciting technology advance. Interestingly in over 6 months of operation we have only seen 2 searches using a sentence, most people use ‘search code’ because we are all familiar with how to get the best from Google so that's what we see. I feel we are a way off people using natural language for search, especially when the results are often too vague as a result.

What comes to mind is how not to compromise yourself when you depend on ChatGPT, which is produced by a third-party company.

I think it's important to make sure that people who use ChatGPT are secure and that the IP is owned by the right people. You hear of companies uploading proprietary information and then wondering why that information appears for other people.

As with all new technology the intent might be altruistic but we need to see how it can be manipulated for malicious or simply nefarious purposes and educate staff accordingly.

One of the things to mention is that telecommunications now is very exciting industry because a lot of new technologies appear. And I just want to know what other things you find fascinating about industry because you've had a vast experience there.

We are still trying to sell the cool things this industry built four or five years ago. Chatbots, such as ones used at Alaris mKit and 2 way conversational tools, have existed for a number of years. Yet, we are still only now educating brands to understand how best to use them. More importantly, as an industry we have only recently worked out how to sell them.

My background is in solution selling and business platforms so it’s clear to see the shift from wholesale to solution selling has not been an easy transition for the messaging industry which is historically used to selling wholesale. But it feels like we are getting there and you can see the shift to ROI and industry vertical sales teams starting to have an impact.?

What this means is we’re finally starting to see some of the really cool things we can do with chatbots. By using engaging message types like carousels, buttons, payments, and media we are seeing a steady increase in 2 way conversational commerce and customer service use cases, and the supporting case studies illustrating the ROI.

If we look at Brazil and what WhatsApp and Meta are doing with their online brand catalog and being able to take online payments, we can see the potential. If Google drops message-based payments with RCS and Apple with iMessage, we have exciting opportunities for conversational commerce on a global scale.

It's exciting to see consumers going all the way from a new customer into customer service, being sold or up-sold to, and cycling back through. We will see many more examples of this over the next year or so from companies such as Out There Media, who are creating some fantastic messaging experiences with RCS and WhatsApp.

Will SMS be relevant in P2A or will they just serve as a way to send codes or passwords?

SMS is absolutely relevant to P2A use cases. In countries where SMS can be used by businesses for 2-way messaging, what better way to speak to your customer at the time they most want to speak to you? A2P marketing is great but P2A is even more effective and keeping a customer happy.

So we've covered the tech aspects. What's about the human side of the business? So what are the most important personal traits people need to be successful in telecommunications, especially those who are just entering the field?

Most of the people I meet have worked in it forever for various companies. Everyone seems to know everyone from a number of companies from years ago. The Telecommunications industry is a small community. To be a part of it, you need to be an honorable and nice person. If you create a bad name for yourself in this industry, everyone will know about it.

That's probably true of many industries, but the telecommunications industry is very relationship-based, and technical knowledge is not the only important factor. Spending time communicating with people on a personal level to create relationships is vital. Trust mirrors all the way through our industry, even in the relationship between an operator and their customer.

In summary, being a nice person, making sure you're giving people time, and being honorable are more important than any other aspect in this industry. Technical knowledge can be learned, but these qualities need to be ingrained in your nature.

So telecommunications is playing long-term games with long-term people, right?

I believe that long-term relationships are what make Aablar stand out. The trust we have with our partners is essential because we ask them to entrust us with their brands and customers. We rely on CPaaS players and messaging players to provide us with all their customer data and they need to know that we are trustworthy to even consider doing so.

We do not sell messages or provide bot services in order to maintain our neutrality in the industry. We strive to build trust with our partners, which is the foundation of our business.

This idea of trust is rooted in my initial motivation for starting this company - I wanted to create something useful for a friend and stumbled upon a solution that could benefit many people, not just those with accessibility issues. Our primary goal is to offer a service that works for everyone, and this cannot happen without trust.

The last question, which is the most philosophical one is what would be the one thing you would like everybody in the telecommunication industry to believe in??

P2A is crucial. There have been several instances where, when we start talking about P2A use cases, people don't understand it. They understand OTP, notifications, and marketing campaigns but we are finding that getting the consumer to start the conversation is very much a secondary thought, if at all.

I think that's the one thing I want our industry to take away from all of this. P2A is critical to the future of all businesses in our industry, and it should be a key consideration when they are looking at how to increase revenue from messaging over the next few years.