[Client Interview]High-frequency contacts established through the use of an SMS delivery API and its use in the hiring arena

XOXZO’s SMS delivery API sees active use by Career Mart, a consulting and outsourcing firm that focuses on employment for new graduates and career professionals. We interviewed Mr. Kinichi Hattori, their general manager in charge of employment outsourcing, and Mr. Kazuya Ogura, technical chief of their employment consulting division, to hear their thoughts on what was behind their decision to use an API as well as the results.

(above) Mr. Kin-ichi Hattori, the General Manager in charge of employment oursourcing at Careermart Co.,Ltd

How are you using XOXZO’s API?

We receive contracts for employment-related clerical tasks from a variety of companies we serve as clients. We have a process where we invite students and transitioning professionals to informational seminars and other company events, but currently we simply notify them by saying “we are holding a seminar,” which does not result in a lot of participation. During these activities, we send multiple notifications via email, but they tend to get buried in inboxes. This is why we’ve been using SMS notifications that can reach directly to mobile phones.

We largely support recruitment sites such as Rikunabi and Mynavi and use an electronic applicant tracking system, but this typically allows for messages to be sent only to computer email addresses or those provided by cell phone carriers; there is no feature for sending SMS. In hopes of more effective method of delivering our messages and increasing the rate of those messages that are actually read, we decided to implement XOXZO’s system.

How did you hear about XOXZO？

When we simply searched the internet for SMS delivering services, we discovered 2 or 3 companies. One of them was XOXZO. We reached out to them, and first became acquainted when their CEO, Mr. Iqbal, came to visit us.

What were your criteria when comparing the services provided by other SMS API providers?

We were originally considering to link “inputting the data we want distributed into an SMS sending tool,” with our existing management tool for an automation. We actually tried this with another company’s, but we ran into issues such as being unable to read the data or encountering errors, so moving towards automation proved difficult. However, XOXZO has great compatibility and the link went very smoothly, so we decided to move forward with them.

(right) Mr.Kazuya Ogura, the Technical Chief of employment consulting at Careermart Co.,Ltd

We also took a look at the tools we had been using in other departments; the need for up-front fees and the fact that it took several days to start sending were big obstacles. To that end, XOXZO is a cloud-based service and the fees are based only on how much you use it from day one. The removal of these barriers was also a large part of our decision to have selected XOXZO.

What kind of results have you seen since implementation?

Currently, our client companies send text that they want sent as an SMS to our company’s representatives, and those representatives input that text and press a button to automatically deliver it to a list of registrants. There is a maximum limit of 70 characters, but the rate of messages being read is higher than email, which makes our customers happy to use this tool.

Recently, recruitment and hiring plans that focus on customer flow and stories have become more desirable, and we have heard that using this SMS delivery tool has made it easier to sell business solutions. Since implementation, we’ve seen a seamless rise in the number of SMS messages sent out, and we are seeing numerous requests from recruitment staff who want to keep in regular contact with job seekers at low cost. Furthermore, there are not many employment services that offer direct notifications via SMS, which helps us to differentiate from our competitors.

Reactions from our customers have honestly been better than expected. Meeting with the three major needs; “Client companies just want people to read this;” “Our Sales Dept want to sell solutions” and “Operators need simple tool” has achieved a win-win-win situation.

What do you think of its user friendliness?

A system administrator’s simple input of some settings manually has merged the function in our automation; our company operators have been grateful for the short learning curve.

Our customers send us suggestions for variety use of the message body, that surely are effective to achieve improved response. SMS has the capability to reach a large number of people on a small budget, so more creative use would expand its future use cases. We will polish our approach to our client by suggesting how best to utilize the time and resources saved by SMS delivery.

[Careermart Co.,Ltd]

Address：4th floor, Asorty Nishi Shinjuku BLDG, 7-3-4 Nishi Shinjuku, Shinjuku, Tokyo
Foundation：November 1, 2002
URL：http://www.careermart.co.jp/