In this episode of GTM Full Throttle, host Michael Falato interviews Karen Crivello, a senior leader at MMD Smart, a unified mobile messaging platform that enables brands to converse with customers across SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, and voice. Karen explains the platform’s purpose: delivering the right message at the right time, in the right context, on the preferred channel, turning generic communications into personalized conversations. She highlights the problem of “customer amnesia” where fragmented support across channels leads to repeated customer stories and frustration, and shows how a single view of all interactions solves it. Real‑world use cases include an airline’s disjointed WhatsApp support that woke a traveler at 3 am, a real‑estate firm that boosted engagement by over 30 % by sending targeted WhatsApp property alerts with images and interactive buttons, and a global jewelry retailer that saw a ten‑fold increase in engagement using WhatsApp for branding and sales. Karen shares a marketing lesson: the critical importance of a granular Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and continuous campaign measurement, recounting a LinkedIn‑targeted WhatsApp campaign that underperformed until the ICP was refined. She concludes by describing the primary personas who benefit from the platform—marketing, customer‑experience, and IT teams—and notes that MMD Smart is especially suited for small‑to‑medium businesses thanks to easy integration and customizable support.
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All right. Hello everybody. It's GTM Full Throttle, and we have a special guest today, Karen Crivello from MMD Smart. It's a mobile messaging unified platform that basically targets what, every peripheral and every piece of equipment? to communicate with people. Tell me a little bit more about your role there in that company.
Well, hi. First of all, Michael, thank you for having me. It's great being here and really happy to speak about the company and how we are helping our customers. And we're basically a company that is helping change communications into conversations. So what does that really mean for today's brands. It lets brands communicate with their customers, um, at the right time, with the right context, and on the right channel. So in today's, I would say, end-user life, your customers' everyday life, they're getting so much information on different channels and they're basically ignoring it. So if brands know what communication channels their customers prefer, they're able to better communicate with them today. So it used to be email. Nobody reads their emails anymore. Everyone's overloaded. We have SMS today, which is very simple and very broad and great for notifications, but not great for bidirectional communications or for communications with videos or any type of multimedia interactive content. And so SMS has progressed to RCS, but RCS isn't widely used today. Then you have companies today using WhatsApp as a communication channel. And there are others. For example, in certain industries, Viber, and there's Telegram, and of course, voice as well. So you've got lots of ways to communicate with your customers. You need to know what to say, when to say it, and where to say it. So that's what we're really helping our customers do.
How long you been with them?
I've been with the company for a year and a half now. I have some previous experience with customer experience company at NICE Communications in the past, and I've worked with different technologies. Over my career.
And what, what's something that you can talk about that maybe is a good use case, right? Like Company A was doing it this way and now we're able to figure out how to make it more unified. Like they have 30 reps or, or there are contacts. Just like do a 2-minute story of something that we can digest and associate How it helps.
Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, a really big challenge today that companies have is customer— what we call customer amnesia. And this is more for customer support or customer service desks where they're speaking with a customer on one channel and then switching to another or to another rep, and the information isn't passed on, and the customer is just extremely frustrated. Either repeating the story or not getting the same answers or not getting any response whatsoever. So in that respect, having one platform that can give you a unified view over all the communications on all the different channels you're using is a fabulous use case. And I'll give you an opposite example of what I personally experience. with an airline. I was flying the next day. I was in, I was in Thailand actually, and I was flying the next morning and I had a question about the flights because I had a connecting flight. And I wrote on the, on the brand's WhatsApp support. And which, by the way, WhatsApp for customers who are traveling is a great channel. And so they said, okay, our rep will get back to you. What is your problem? I wrote to them my question, and they said, we'll get back to you. In the meantime, I couldn't wait. It was getting late, and I called them, and I got my answer at three in the morning. A rep on WhatsApp tried to get in contact with me. I was sleeping. They didn't know I was in Thailand. They didn't know that my My question was resolved, and they're waking me up at three in the morning. So it was very frustrating, and it and this is just a simple example of how what how we can help companies better communicate with their customers. A flip side is is is an actual customer of ours. It's a real estate customer. They have invest they have investors in real estate from all over the world. And they were communicating mostly on email. And what they did was they added WhatsApp because, as I said, international communications, WhatsApp is a really good channel today. Less so in America, more so in certain European and Latin America where penetration is over 90%. And what they did was every time a new property came up, They knew who was looking for that type of property from their CRM, from their customer management system, and they were able to send a communication on WhatsApp to only the customers who are interested in that type of property with a picture, with interactive buttons so that the customer could actually ask questions about the property. And they had a jump within a short period of time of over 30%. Of engagements with their customers just by adding the WhatsApp channel. Another example is an e-commerce company. They're actually a retail brand. They sell diamonds, they sell jewelry, and they're global. And they also added WhatsApp and they 10 times their engagement Okay, 10 times their engagement with their customer base. So they used it not only for sales as well, but for also just branding themselves by sending like, hey, we have, you know, a new, a new line of diamond rings and with pictures and so forth and so forth. And they really seeing an uptick in sales from that. Edition of WhatsApp.
So what's, um, what's a lesson learned personally of something that went really good that you could describe in like in 60 seconds or something that just didn't— was like, oh my God, I learned from the mistake?
As a marketing professional? As—
yeah, as a business. Yeah, this is a business-to-business podcast, so yeah.
Oh, I have so many mistakes, so much to choose from. Actually, I, this is what I say, making a mistake is really the best way to learn.
Yep.
We actually did a campaign for a specific channel and WhatsApp, and we invested money in advertising for this campaign and with paid advertising that was part of the campaign. And we took our, you know, we're, we're a global company. We're selling to across the globe and to different industries. And what we did was we said, okay, we took our target countries and we put it into the profile. This was specifically for LinkedIn, and we sent off the campaign. And then, you know, moving forward, when we were starting to measure the results of the campaign, We realized, whoa, if this is the channel, we did not check the penetration rates to all, to all of the countries. So our ICP— and that's the ABC of marketing— and we defined our ICP from the beginning. We're really careful about our ICP overall as a company. But for this specific campaign, the ICP was, was more granular. And we didn't do that from the beginning, and we changed it, and we saw results, much better results when we really fine-tuned the ICP. So I would say my lessons learned for every marketer: ICP number one. Number two is really measure your campaigns. that are running on a regular basis. Don't just let them run and say, okay, will it work? Will it not? Really look at what's happening and analyze it and make changes on the fly. And it never hurts to say, oh, we made a mistake, let's change it and try something else.
So just to kind of conclude the interview, who do you want to reach out to you? And what types of companies and people and personas?
Okay. So a communication system can really be relevant for different types of personas in companies, whether it's marketing, customer experience, and even IT. For example, if you want to send notifications for authentication purposes, okay, it may not— that's not marketing or customer experience. It's part of the product onboarding. onboarding and so forth. So those are the different types of personas. And what types of companies? I would say we are very well geared for the small-medium companies. And one of our benefits is our customization, the easy— easiness of integrating with a company's management system, how we support our customers. And, you know, a lot of companies look at only the big customers to give that fine-tuned customization support. I think that we're really good with the smaller companies.
Well, thanks for being on the show today, and we look forward to keeping in touch.
