Rakuten Communications, a subsidiary of global innovation leader Rakuten Inc., headquartered in Tokyo, and cloud communications specialist, Content Guru Ltd., have entered into a strategic partnership to deliver connect storm cloud contact centre solutions into the Japanese market.

connect storm will support the multi-award-winning portfolio of storm® applications and will target the rapidly-growing Japanese cloud contact centre market, which is set to rise to 39% of overall contact centre seats in the country by 20201. It will be launched at the TechMatrix CRM Forum in Tokyo on 23rd February 2018, with Content Guru also opening a Tokyo office during Q1/2018 to support the partnership.

“We anticipate that, by leveraging storm’s capabilities and Rakuten Communications’ best-in-class services, many contact centres will benefit from improved customer experience and workforce productivity,” said Yasufumi Hirai, Representative Director and Chairman, CEO of Rakuten Communications. “We look forward to combining our AI capabilities with Content Guru’s experience to deliver contact centre solutions to our more than one thousand customers.”

Sean Taylor, Global CEO of Content Guru, added: “Asia-Pac is a critical region in our global expansion strategy and its cloud contact centre market is seeing impressive growth. We’re delighted to enter into an exciting partnership with Rakuten, and are convinced that our shared cultural values and ambitions will drive tremendous success.”

connect storm enables businesses to more effectively communicate with their customers through channels such as SMS, web chat, email, voice and social media, unified within a single interface for contact centre agents. The platform also integrates with hundreds of third-party CRM, WFO, and ERP systems, and scales to handle any concurrent demand in contact.

1 MIC Lab, Cloud CRM Market Forecast, 2017