Jennifer Klos

I have to say that my parents were extremely hard workers. My dad worked for GM and retired there at 30-plus years, and he worked a ton of hours. My mom was the general manager of a successful business, and she worked until she was in her 60s, and she worked a lot of hours too. I think that my parents have definitely instilled in me that hard work pays off. That's one of the things that has helped me to understand and be successful in this role. It's not necessarily a 9-to-5. There's a lot of out-of-hours work when you're working globally with international clients. You have to put in the time, you have to put in the effort, and you have to really build a relationship to get your clients to trust you. If your clients don't trust you, they're not going to trust their users with you either. They're not going to trust spending a ton of money on these services if they can't trust you. So I think just being a hard worker and really trying to grow and really appreciate the relationships with the clients I'm working with, I think that's been a huge key attribute into having a successful career within this industry.

I would definitely say make sure that you get a better understanding of what the industry looks like as a whole. And once you do that, just ensure that you know that you're going to put in hard work. Find a company with a culture that you like. Everyone doesn't like the same culture, but the culture of a company is extremely important. I found that out when I started at Open Market, and I just found that the culture was amazing, and then when I moved to TeleSign, it was a very similar culture. That was one of the key things that drew me to it. So make sure that you like what you do every day. Make sure that when you wake up - I mean, clearly we all have bad days where you don't want to go to work - but make sure it's somewhere you want to be. Make sure it's something you want to be doing. You're not going to succeed for your clients if you don't want to be there. Make sure that if you want to get into this industry, you get a little bit of background on it, make sure you understand it, and then make sure you want to be there. Make sure the culture fits you. Everyone is not the same. I love that I'm very close to a lot of my coworkers. We talk, we text, we talk outside of work. It's kind of the culture I like - everyone's kind of involved to a point that you need to be - but that's not for everyone. My biggest point to anyone that's looking to get into any industry is when you start looking at an organization, make sure you like the culture. Make sure when you go through an interview, you ask the right questions, because the job might be something you like, but if the company is not something that you fit into, that will never work. My number one thing would be to just make sure that the company that you would like to work for has the culture that fits for you.

I think the biggest challenge right now is that everybody is financially strained. It's not just people personally, it's clients as well, it's companies as well, so everyone is trying to cut back on their spending, cut back on their expenses. Almost all my clients came to me and say we need to cut the expenses, we need to do some savings things, we need to do something so we can save the company money. I think that's the huge thing right now - the environment as a whole, our economy as a whole, is everyone's looking to save money. The challenges are we have many solutions that can help clients do that, but it's getting those solutions in the right hands. So making sure your clients are having the solutions they need, whether it's SMS, whether it's Viber, whether it's them using email, whether it's using RCS or WhatsApp - there's a lot of new solutions that are coming into place to help try to cut savings for your clients. Also, when we give them different solutions, it takes resources on their side to maybe change some of their back-end stuff technically. So you really have to express what this can do for them, how this can save them money, and make sure that they invest in you as much as you invest in them. On the flip side, with the cost savings challenge, I think we are moving into an omni-channel industry where we're not just offering SMS, we're offering many different solutions to our clients to be able to communicate with their customers and get a good customer experience. So there is so much opportunity right now to move to different solutions so that we can continue to provide the services and the customer experience that our clients need. There are so many new opportunities out there to get them to grow, and get their accounts to grow, and get them to grow into different solutions. At one time, it was a very SMS-heavy world, and it has definitely turned into many different options that you can utilize besides SMS. The industry continues to grow. The industry is nowhere where it was 3 years ago, and it's nowhere where it's going to be 3 years from now. So I think within an industry that's continuing to evolve, you always have new opportunities present themselves.

I think the most important values are being proud of what you do. I think that a lot of people say you shouldn't work to live, you should live to work, but I also think that that's a very difficult thing to do when we all are financially strained for certain situations, paying your mortgage, paying your bills. So I think that if you can find a job that you're happy at, that you can excel in, that financially can help you be kind of where you want to be, that you're also proud of the work you do, I think that's definitely something that is unique. I don't think that everybody can find that. I don't think that is something that's easily found. And since I stumbled on this, I am extremely happy that I did. And I don't foresee myself leaving this industry or this role anytime soon. It's definitely something that I think is a proud thing to say that I've been here for so long and doing this for so long, but I also think this industry as a whole is trying to change things. We're trying to help people. We're trying to do fraud protection for companies, and with that being said, when we're doing fraud protection for our clients, that is also doing fraud protection for everyone. When people reach out to you via SMS and you click on a link and your whole phone gets hacked or your identity gets stolen, that is something that we are trying to prevent. So yes, we're providing a service to our clients who send this to our users, but also, as a whole, we're trying to prevent that from happening. My parents' identity got stolen 3 or 4 times. I think it's very important to have that fraud protection. With all this technology and everything being done via our phones and SMS, I think that fraud protection is just something that's so important. So it's a job, but I also think that helping people and helping prevent this from happening is something that's really important. So I definitely take pride in that. I think that kind of extends to my personal life as well. I think just being proud of what you do - I'm proud of the family I have, I'm proud of the friends I have, I'm proud of the things I've accomplished just as a whole. So I think that all just integrates. My job is very important to me and a major part of my life. So I think between the job and your family and your friends, as long as you're proud of what you're doing, I think that's definitely a win.