Kaizn and Vonage partner to help Australian contact centres rebuild customer trust

Australian businesses are losing customers before the conversation even starts. Years of spam calls, scam texts and unknown numbers have trained people to ignore outbound contact - and the businesses trying to reach customers legitimately are caught in the fallout. For industries like debt collection, financial services, healthcare and utilities, a missed call or an unread message isn't just a CX metric. It directly affects revenue, compliance and operational performance.

This is a very real problem in our industry and it's why partnering with Vonage makes sense.

About Vonage

Vonage (part of Ericsson) is a global cloud communications leader whose API infrastructure underpins how some of the world's largest businesses communicate with their customers. Their platform spans voice, messaging, video and network-level verification – flexible, developer-friendly, and built to integrate with systems businesses already run.

In ANZ, Vonage is expanding its presence at a moment when the communications landscape is shifting quickly. RCS is approaching carrier rollout, and Branded Calling is live. Network-level authentication is moving from nice-to-have to baseline expectation. The businesses getting ready now will be better positioned than the ones reacting later.

What we're building together

Our strategic partnership has three clear goals.

The first is a specific client problem. According to Hiya's Annual Industry Report, 80% of unidentified calls now go unanswered. Customers have stopped picking up numbers they don't recognise — and legitimate businesses are paying for it just as much as the scammers causing the problem. Vonage's Branded Calling capabilities are built to fix that. Customers see a verified business name, logo, and call intent before they decide whether to answer.

The second is closing the gap between technology and strategy. Vonage builds strong infrastructure. Kaizn brings the industry context, implementation experience and vendor-neutral positioning to make sure it gets deployed in the right places, for the right reasons. Technology without strategic fit is just an unwanted cost down the line.

The third is getting clients ready before the market catches up. Australian carrier rollout for RCS is expected mid-2026. We're already working with clients to understand where these capabilities fit within their environments - so they're not starting from scratch when they land.

What this means for our clients

Vonage's own data shows answer rates can improve by 105% when context is added to calls. For contact centres running high-volume outbound - appointment reminders, service notifications, healthcare follow-ups - that can make a huge difference.

RCS takes the same principle into messaging. Every message arrives with your verified business identity, rich media and interactive buttons, in a persistent branded thread that lives in the customer's native messaging app. No app download required. Customers can act — book an appointment, confirm a payment, respond to a query, all without leaving the conversation. Global RCS traffic is projected to grow 50% in 2025 and surpass 200 billion messages by 2029, according to Juniper Research, driven by businesses recognising that plain SMS no longer cuts through.

Beyond Branded Calling and RCS, the partnership gives our clients access to Vonage's broader API stack:

• Silent authentication verifies customers in the background without asking them to do anything - no OTP, no friction, no drop-off at a critical moment in the interaction.
• AI voice flows that contact centre teams can build and update without needing a developer every time something changes in the script or the process.
• Unified messaging across SMS, RCS and WhatsApp Business through a single API layer, with failover routing built in rather than bolted on. RCS also fails over to SMS automatically if a customer's device isn't RCS-enabled, so no one gets missed.
• Call transcription and sentiment analysis embedded from the start — not retrofitted after the fact.
• Secure, compliant video for high-value interactions in financial services, healthcare and government - without stitching together separate tools.

Daniel Harding, Founder and Director of Kaizn, said the partnership reflects exactly what the industry needs right now:

"Trust is the core problem in customer communications right now, and most technology vendors treat it as someone else's problem to solve. Vonage doesn't. Their network-level verification and communications APIs are a natural fit for what Kaizn's clients need — not just better technology, but interactions customers actually welcome. We're excited to bring that combination to the Australian market."

Raj Shah, Country Manager ANZ at Vonage, shared the same perspective:

"We see a clear alignment in how both teams approach solving real customer challenges — particularly around trust, security, and meaningful engagement through communications. By combining Kaizn's strategic expertise with Vonage's communications APIs and network capabilities, we're well positioned to help businesses rebuild customer confidence, deliver more secure interactions, and create experiences that customers actually want to engage with."

Why this matters for our industry

Customers have stopped answering calls and opening messages from numbers they don't recognise. According to the ACCC's 2025 Targeting Scams Report, Australians lost $2.18 billion to scams last year, a 7.8% increase on 2024 across 481,523 reports. That's the environment our clients operate in every day.

The data shows exactly where the damage is happening. Losses from phone call scams dropped 32% in 2025 because Australians stopped answering. Telco blocking and industry codes are working to reduce scam call volume, but the side effect is that legitimate businesses are getting caught in the same net. Customers who've trained themselves not to pick up don't distinguish between a scammer and a healthcare provider chasing a missed appointment. Text message is following the same pattern. Scam text reports fell 62% in 2025, but financial losses from texts still rose. The scams are becoming fewer but more targeted — and customer trust in the channel is eroding regardless.

Branded Calling and RCS address this by giving businesses the ability to identify themselves clearly before a customer decides whether to engage. Verified identity, branded display, persistent conversation history — these restore confidence in channels that are being abandoned.

For contact centres, this shifts the economics of outbound significantly. Fewer wasted agent hours, better campaign ROI, and a channel that works because customers know who they're dealing with.

The businesses that move early also carry a structural advantage: once registered and running RCS campaigns, switching providers requires weeks of re-registration downtime. Getting clients set up on the right infrastructure now is a meaningful competitive edge going into 2027.

What's next

Over the coming months, we'll be running joint webinars with the Vonage ANZ team, publishing practical guides on what RCS and Branded Calling means for different industries, and developing specific use cases for financial services, healthcare, government and contact centre operations.

If you want to understand where any of this fits in your environment - or want a conversation about your current outbound or messaging stack - reach out to Dan directly here.