A Korean startup that pitched to Japanese companies with a 'bamboo earpick'... 11 years later, this is what happened.

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"When meeting with local Japanese companies, we gave bamboo earpicks as gifts. This symbolized our commitment to cleaning ears and listening carefully to customers' voices."

Choi Jae-yong, Representative of Channel Corporation's Japan Branch, which operates the corporate customer service (CS) solution 'Channel Talk', stated during an interview ahead of 'ChannelCon Japan 2026' held in Tokyo on the 4th: "The bamboo earpick was a visual embodiment of Channel Talk's philosophy of being customer-driven."

Channel Corporation entered the Japanese market shortly after its incorporation in 2014. Currently, approximately 20% of total revenue comes from Japan. The number of local customers who have adopted Channel Talk reaches 25,000 companies. Last year, sales in Japan grew by about 50% compared to the previous year.

In the early stages of entering Japan, various strategies such as agency and partnerships were attempted but repeatedly failed. Ultimately, a breakthrough was found through direct customer engagement via standard sales practices. Choi (CEO) stated, "The time accumulated through steady sales efforts is our greatest asset."

Focusing not only on acquiring new customers but also on existing ones proved equally effective. Choi (CEO) emphasized, "We reinforced features more often based on suggestions from customers who were already using the service well and saying, 'It would be great if this could be improved,' rather than requests like, 'I would use it if this feature existed.'"

Among Japanese client companies, fashion businesses are particularly numerous. Due to Japan's unique characteristic where regular employees cannot be laid off even when stores close due to COVID-19, store staff stepped into online 'customer service,' marking the starting point for adopting Channel Talk.

Especially unlike Korea, Japan has more pre-purchase inquiries than post-purchase reviews, making Channel Talk a perfect fit for the fashion and e-commerce sectors. Currently, United Arrows, Shimamura (the second-largest fashion company), and Adastria (the third-largest) use Channel Talk.

More than half of approximately 20 major Japanese fashion brands with over 100 stores are clients. Major food corporations like Nissin, LeTAO cheesecake, and Kyoto's 150-year-old tea brand Ito Kyuemon have also become clients. Recently, adoption is expanding to platform companies where inquiries come from both sellers and users.

What changed the landscape was 'ALF (ALF),' an AI agent embedded in Channel Talk. Japanese companies, which valued customer service but lacked manpower, responded strongly to ALF's strength of being able to handle customers even without staff.

Lee Kyung-hoon, CAIO (Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer) of Channel Corporation, stated, "In Japan, the resolution rate is high even with AI alone, and ALF is replacing 80-90% of tasks previously done by humans." He added, "The average consultation resolution rate through AI reaches 80%."

In Korea, the resolution rate is around 60%. In Korea, there are many inquiries requiring integration with period-based systems such as post-purchase order tracking, delivery, exchanges, and returns. In contrast, Japan has more pre-purchase inquiries, allowing high resolution rates even with just AI agent RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).

Channel Corporation aims for 15 billion won in sales in Japan this year and plans to expand its Japan team from the current 50 members to 70 by year-end. Kim Jae-hong, CRO of Channel Corporation, said, "Our goal for the next decade is to grow into a service that provides the best customer experience in Japan."

In this regard, the new feature 'CoS (Chief of Staff)' was unveiled for the first time at this ChannelCon held in Japan. CoS is a tool that collects sales, operations, marketing, and consultation data to analyze insights, enabling not only executives but all employees to make data-driven decisions.

Choi (CEO) stated, "CoS users can derive business insights through natural language questions alone, such as 'Analyze the new customer acquisition channels for the past month' or 'Summarize the top 10% of items by sales,' without needing complex analysis tasks like separate data extraction or preprocessing."

This CAIO emphasized, "Existing BI (Business Intelligence) tools could only diagnose 'there is a problem,' but lacked follow-up actions, causing customers not to pay. The core lies in taking direct action via text or phone calls to customers who added items to their cart but did not complete the purchase."

Channel Talk already possesses customer touchpoints such as SMS, KakaoTalk, and phone calls. This CAIO stated, "With a single click, you can contact thousands of people, and ALF can persuade customers with coupons as weapons to convert them into purchases."

It is explained that CoS will become a new platform for the next stage of customer consultation: 'actual purchase conversion and revenue growth.' Kim Jae-hong, CRO, stated, "The greatest differentiation lies in the integration combining CRM and marketing with consultation."

CoS's AI marketing function persuades customers like actual offline store clerks to drive up sales. This transforms the CS department from a cost center into a 'profit-generating department.'

For Channel Corporation, Japan is a key hub for global expansion. Choi (CEO) stated, "We have always said that we create in Korea and prove monetization in Japan before going global. Now is the timing to prove monetization. We will generate more sales in Japan, which has a larger population and economic scale than Korea."

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