How JobReady turned SMS into a stronger product and partner opportunity

For JobReady, SMS started as a standard feature. Over time, it became something more valuable: a communication capability with the potential to improve customer workflows, strengthen the product offering and open up new partnership opportunities. JobReady develops cloud-based platforms that help customers streamline and automate operations and business processes, and SMS had long been part of that ecosystem. Every JobReady product already offered SMS functionality, with message sending automated through system triggers. 

The business first began working with MessageMedia in 2012 when it signed up as a corporate account to support a customer that had specifically requested reliable SMS functionality. But despite having the feature in place, JobReady did not yet have a clear view of how widely customers were using SMS, which providers they were using, or how many messages were being sent. James Hourn said the team also had a limited understanding of the broader range of SMS applications across the business and was not fully leveraging its customer base or offering the level of support it could. 

That changed after an internal customer review helped identify a number of JobReady customers already using SMS. From there, the relationship with Sinch Engage (formerly MessageMedia) shifted from a basic supplier arrangement to a more strategic partnership. JobReady was assigned a partner account manager, worked more closely with the partner marketing team and started taking a more deliberate view of how SMS could be used across its product range. Hourn described this as elevating the relationship and identifying new opportunities and SMS applications.

A key part of that shift was better understanding how SMS fit the industries JobReady serves. Its customers include education providers and employment consultants, both of whom often need to communicate important information to students and job seekers while also being able to show that communication was delivered. Hourn said SMS is especially important in these sectors because so much of the communication is passive or one-directional, and because it reaches audiences on a channel they are already using every day. 

The partnership also highlighted practical ways to improve how SMS was deployed across JobReady’s products. Some parts of the range used email-to-SMS, while others relied on an API. Extending API capability more broadly promised greater flexibility and immediacy in customer workflows, while also making it easier to automate the dissemination of information without requiring staff to repeat the same manual task over and over. Hourn pointed to the simplicity of sending communication in bulk and noted that all of JobReady’s customers use SMS at some point in the relationship with their own end users.

Beyond the product implications, JobReady also saw value in the way the partnership itself worked. Hourn described the preferred partner model positively, citing fast follow-up, strong response times and communication that consistently added value. He also noted that when challenges did arise, the responsiveness of the team helped reinforce the strength of the relationship. 

With that foundation in place, JobReady began working on improved SMS documentation to better manage customer expectations and support more effective communication around the service. The broader result was not a single headline metric, but something more strategic: better visibility into customer SMS usage, a clearer understanding of new applications across the product range and a stronger path toward more automated messaging across JobReady’s platforms.