Josh Kim of Channel Talk On 5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Level Leader Of A Retail Tech Company

An Interview With Kieran Powell

Be realistic and conservative. Although the world of tech and AI are moving at a rapid pace, it’s important to remain focused on your company’s vision and mission. Technology is only as good as the purpose it serves to humans — so it’s crucial to stay relevant to today’s consumer.

The retail industry is undergoing a seismic shift, largely driven by technology. From e-commerce to AI-driven customer experiences, technology is redefining how consumers interact with retail brands. This rapid transformation presents unique challenges and opportunities for C-level leaders in the retail tech space. Effective leadership is more critical than ever to navigate these changes, drive innovation, and maintain a competitive edge. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Josh Kim, founder and Co-CEO of Channel Talk.

Josh Jaehong Kim is a serial entrepreneur who created and drove successful exits for three startups. Currently, he is founder and Co-CEO of Channel Talk, a leading CRM-based live chat tool used by over 160,000 brands globally.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

Thank you! I am excited to be here. I don’t know if I would call myself a serial entrepreneur, but I have made a habit of creating businesses that solve an immediate need that I have personally experienced. Back in 2014 when I was on my third start up, I was walking home from my office in Seoul and started wondering how so many mom-and-pop shops were not only surviving…but thriving. We were experiencing a difficult swing in our business, and it was hard for us to make personal connections with our most valuable customers.

Then it dawned on me…the mom-and-pop shops I passed on the way home knew their customers on a personal level and were able to experience a relationship with them first-hand. I started to wonder how I could replicate that in the world of e-commerce, where all my current businesses were operating.

At the end of the day, we are all consumers. And as someone who is extremely passionate about customer service and experience, I really wanted to create a solution that enables online businesses to create a personal and concierge experience for their customers. And with that, Channel Talk was born!

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I think with any start-up, there are a lot of growing pains that you look back on and cringe. But there are two things that happened in the early days of Channel that still stand out to me as great learning experiences.

The first happened right after we secured our first round of seed funding. At the time, Channel was in its infancy, and we were operating with about $1M in revenue and just in Seoul. So, after seeing a check for $500K, we had lofty goals to say the least. My partner and I were eager to expand the business outside of the Korean market and started spending our investment on global expansion.

Looking back, we were about 10 steps ahead of where we needed to be focusing our time, effort, and capital. We were young, excited, and eager to get Channel to the global stage — but we should have been a bit more conservative in those early days. Even now, I try to prioritize what is going to be best for product and team quality.

The second was simply a lesson learned in building the right team. With 10 employees on our original roster, 7 of them held director positions. The mix was all off…and we vowed to ensure that Channel would keep 50% of staff focused on product development and innovation. Because at the end of the day, that is what creates a lasting, quality solution.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We are so excited to be part of the AI revolution that is happening now. Our whole goal is to use technology to create the best customer experience online. We have integrated an AI-powered chatbot, ALF, into our product that allows businesses to weed out 70% of repetitive and generic customer inquiries (like returns, and shipment status), so agents can focus on the interactions that require a human-touch.

We are bringing the human element of customer service and AI together to help small and medium-sized businesses automate some conversions, and spend the rest of their time on the conversations that turn into purchases and customer loyalty.

As I mentioned above, we will continue to invest our time and money into new features that can help build a seamless experience for brands online. And AI will continue to be a huge component of that!

Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. The retail industry has seen a significant shift towards digital and e-commerce solutions. How have you adapted your business strategy to this digital transformation, and what challenges did you face in this transition?

This is a good question — and a very important one as well. We are living in a post-Covid era for the retail industry — where so many brands are still suffering from the fall out of the lockdowns and reduced foot traffic.

I was having a conversation with my VC friends, and it quickly turned into a philosophical discussion about customer expectations. After Covid, so many retailers turned to a digital B2C strategy to survive. However, this was less of a strategic decision and viewed by many consumers as just another channel. But what the retailers missed out on, was mirroring the in-store experience they provided to their customers.

It’s a very important mission for businesses to create a 360-degree omnichannel customer experience. And now it’s what’s setting retailers apart from their competitors in the market. We are seeing an interesting transition in many markets, especially in Korea and Japan where the level of service expected by customers is much higher than what we have here in the states. How can retailers who operate both a brick and mortar and online business keep a consistent and seamless experience across both? How do you use e-commerce as a way to increase loyalty and sales?

Channel’s core philosophy is solving this issue and creating the necessary balance between these two aspects of customer interaction.

Retail technology is heavily focused on enhancing customer experience. Can you share a particular innovation your company has implemented to improve customer engagement and satisfaction? How did this innovation impact your business?

What I’ve noticed over the years is when I talk to brick-and-mortar retailers vs. digitally native retailers, the brick-and-mortar brands have a lot more maturity when it comes to customer experience. They can physically see their customers and know how to convert their visitors into buyers.

It’s much harder for retailers who just operate online to monitor and understand what a customer wants when they land on the website. Customers are quickly converted to data and that data is rarely in the shape of a person — it’s simply numbers on a page. However, successful retailers are able to weed through the data and actually use e-commerce as a powerful sales tool — not just another channel for revenue.

Our platform helps businesses do just that. Channel takes your customer chat function and turns it into a way to engage customers to uncover their needs and wants. We allow your customer team to focus on what they are good at doing — engaging the customer so they can build a connection with the brand. And AI is just accelerating this for us. By using ALF to remove the bulk of repetitive inquiries from your customer service representatives, retailers can accelerate a VIP experience.

Leading a retail tech company often means keeping up with rapid technological changes and market trends. How do you stay ahead of these trends, and what practices do you follow to ensure your team remains agile and innovative?

Technology and advancements in AI are shifting so fast — and our product team is dedicated to ensuring that we stay on the bleeding edge of those changes. In fact, as much as 50% of our team are engineers. Going back to my first lesson learned in the early days of Channel, we pride ourselves on investing in the best developers and product teams who are just as passionate about digitizing concierge-level customer service.

In an industry increasingly dominated by technology, how do you balance the use of tech solutions with the need for a human touch in customer service and team management?

That is our whole ethos at Channel. So many companies these days focus on full automation of activities — completely removing the need for human interaction. We could not disagree more with that approach.

Channel is all about using technology to augment the mundane and allow for more time spent getting to know your customers on a more personal level — especially online. At this point, we all know when we are having a conversation with a robot. We want to enable our clients to quickly weed out the customer conversations that require a human-touch. That way each customer can feel like a VIP, can feel like a brand understands their desires, and are more likely to click purchase.

In an industry increasingly dominated by technology, how do you balance the use of tech solutions with the need for a human touch in customer service and team management?

You have to really think about what technology is here for, and what it can do to benefit the business. Too often, people think technology can and should solve every single problem. We don’t think this is the case, but rather, should be used to enhance the human touch. And this is easier than many people probably realize.

For example, we’ve seen that far too many customer service agents are responding to basic inquiries, and this takes up time. As a result, they are less equipped to get to know more about their best, VIP customers. And this lack of personal touch has a real business impact — not to mention, is really expensive. Some companies then go too far in the other direction and have chat bots answer every single inquiry, which also doesn’t positively improve customer relations, and usually makes customers frustrated.

We strongly believe that technology should be used to access information about customers quickly and efficiently, so that human customer service agents are better equipped to know who their customers are, and be able to most effectively address their needs. It’s not one or the other, it’s using tech to more quickly process information so that customer service agents can provide a better experience.

Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Level Leader Of A Retail Tech Company?” How have these 5 things impacted your work or your career?

1. Take time to experience the non-tech side of your client’s business. Where possible, visit the stores, interact with floor managers, experience the environment created by the brand (the smells, music, lighting). Customer experience is a form of art — its intuitive and personal and it makes a world of a difference in understanding how to implement a digital strategy to mirror that experience online.
2. Take partnerships very seriously, and always prioritize your business before forming partnerships in the market. These can be really helpful but can be counterproductive if you rush into the wrong ones.
3. Never compromise product quality. It has been an effective strategy at Channel for us to remain heavy on developers and light on sales. We want our product to speak for itself and we have found it crucial to stand out against our competitors. In that same vein, we focus a lot of our efforts on earned media and not a lot on paid advertisements. Authenticity and quality are hard to come by these days in tech, and we want to showcase our quality through successful case studies and customer stories.
4. Prioritize HR and quality hires. At the end of the day, HR issues can be a huge time-suck for so many tech companies, so from the beginning, we did not outsource our recruiting efforts. We know how important quality people are to building and maintaining a successful business. Talent comes and goes, but we like to be agile in the talents and skills required to keep up with technology development. And having that control makes all the difference in creating a culture of success.
5. Be realistic and conservative. Although the world of tech and AI are moving at a rapid pace, it’s important to remain focused on your company’s vision and mission. Technology is only as good as the purpose it serves to humans — so it’s crucial to stay relevant to today’s consumer.

Looking ahead, what do you believe are the key trends that will shape the future of the retail tech industry? How are you preparing your company to adapt to these trends, and what role do you see your leadership playing in this adaptation?

Omnichannel is creating better and better environments for today’s retail customer. Brands are understanding their customers’ behaviors both on and offline. But the question is — who is doing it better? At the end of the day, it’s the same customer experiencing both sides of a retailer’s ‘store-front’.

We are in a new era of customer expectations and standards, and Channel’s goal is to be the next generation of omni-channel.

As leaders of a B2B company, we absolutely cannot lose sight of the end customer. It is our responsibility to help our clients provide better conversations and service to their customers. The importance of those conversations is only going to increase. The cheapest retention strategy is good customer service, and the worst decision would be to ignore its importance. Channel helps you be effective in doing this.

What is super exciting is that Channel is at the forefront of creating a totally new frontier in the way people shop online. Picture this — a customer goes to a store, loves a product, but is not yet ready to commit. That person goes home and as they are scrolling through their Instagram feed, they see the product. What if that customer can DM the brand with their information and make the purchase right then and there?

We can use technology to re-shape the buying expectations of customers to make it easier and more seamless to get the products they want and need. Channel is all about empowering businesses to know their customers — no matter what channel they are using to interact with the brand.

I am so passionate about good service, and we are creating a movement of higher standards for everyone.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

We put a lot of effort in maintaining our social presence. I would love for readers to follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Youtube. You can visit our website for more information on how we are helping our clients better interact with their customers.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

About The Interviewer: Kieran Powell is the EVP of Channel V Media a New York City Public Relations agency with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised more than 150 companies in the Technology, B2B, Retail and Financial sectors. Prior to taking over business operations at Channel V Media, Kieran held roles at Merrill Lynch, PwC and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can be leveraged to achieve concrete business goals.