[Session Report] A CX Foundation That Supports Growth: Modernizing Customer Experience as Promoted by Japanese Companies #SIGNALCONF

Introduction

This is a report on a session I attended at SIGNAL World Tour Tokyo.

Representatives from three companies, All Nippon Airways (ANA), Excite, and ITANDI, took the stage and talked about their experiences rebuilding their customer touchpoints on top of Twilio. In the session, each company spoke about the constraints it had faced before, the changes after adoption, and advice for companies that are about to take on this effort.

The session overview is as follows.

• Title: A CX Foundation That Supports Growth: Modernizing Customer Experience in Japanese Companies
• Speakers:
  • Hiroshi Ogawa (All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd., Digital Transformation Office, Service Platform Department, Customer Communication Team Leader)
  • Takeshi Fujita (Excite Corporation, Executive Officer and CTO)
  • Akihiro Nagashima (ITANDI, Inc., Director, Executive Officer and CINO)
• Moderator: Kei Nagai (Twilio Account Executive)
• Date and time: October 8, 2026, 17:10 to 17:30

https://signal.twilio.com/tokyo26

The roles that the three companies entrust to Twilio are as follows.

Constraints Before Adoption

ANA: Unable to Fully Notify Passengers of Cancellations and Delays

ANA operates roughly 850 flights per day, and more than 100,000 people board on an ordinary day. The first issue Mr. Ogawa raised was communication when schedules were severely disrupted by typhoons or system failures. Passengers who arrived at the airport without having received any notice reportedly said things like, "Is it in that state right now?" and "If I had known, I would have taken the Shinkansen."

Another issue was the internal system situation. The core systems that handle reservations and operations and the marketing systems were each sending information to customers independently, which Mr. Ogawa described as "spaghetti." He recalled that when they tried to add a new means of communication, the timeline swelled from months to years and the cost to tens of millions of yen or more.

Excite: Equipment Costs Pile Up as Clients Increase

The problem Mr. Fujita pointed out was a structure in which the cost of the call infrastructure grew as the business grew. With the old infrastructure, in addition to the initial investment, they reportedly had to keep buying more equipment in line with the number of consultations.

ITANDI: A Business Custom That Only Worked by Phone

Mr. Nagashima introduced the custom of property confirmation, in which real estate companies call one another to ask, "Is this property still available?" Even after they made it possible to check on the web, the other parties reportedly kept calling regardless. At that time, ITANDI was a startup with only about two engineers, including Mr. Nagashima, and did not have the technology to build a telephone system from scratch.

Changes After Adoption

ANA began using Twilio for email around 2018 to 2019, and it now contacts passengers by email and SMS. Mr. Ogawa said that he came across Twilio while looking for a means to solve the two issues mentioned above. Moderator Mr. Nagai also shared his own experience of being helped when a flight was delayed by weather, as he was able to receive information such as meal vouchers right away.

As for Excite, what Mr. Fujita described as "a fairly large impact for a company of our size" was the change in costs. Since switching to a pay-as-you-go API, the costs reduced over roughly two years of operation amounted to about 180 million yen. Mr. Nagai added that one characteristic of Twilio is that lines can be increased without users noticing, even when incoming calls surge all at once.

ITANDI built an automated phone system that answers property confirmation inquiries on top of Twilio and released it as the company's first product. The volume it handled in busy periods was about 500,000 calls per month, with each call involving an exchange of one to one and a half minutes. Because this many calls no longer needed to be answered by people, Mr. Nagashima spoke with pride that the system significantly boosted productivity across the entire real estate industry. As an intangible benefit, he cited that it calmed the feelings of staff who had been answering inquiry calls with irritation.

Advice for Companies About to Take On This Effort

Finally, the speakers were asked for advice for attendees who are in charge of DX.

Mr. Ogawa candidly said that some airlines around the world have already started providing excellent customer service and that ANA has not yet caught up. After revealing that users have also pointed out that phone lines are hard to get through, he said that since everything cannot be changed at once, they intend to proceed in an agile manner.

Mr. Fujita cited the richness of the public documentation and the ease of getting started right away from the management console. When moving from the old system, the prototype was built by a single engineer, and it took about two months. Following this story, Mr. Nagai revealed an internal custom at Twilio. When employees join, they are first required to build something with Twilio, and Mr. Nagai himself built a mechanism that reads out text from a spreadsheet in less than a day.

Mr. Nagashima's advice was the provocative "Kill the UI." Over the past ten years of smartphone adoption, it has become normal to install an app for every errand and for users to adapt to screens designed for the convenience of the provider. Mr. Nagashima believes that creators have forced this state on users. His view is that now, with advances in AI and communication infrastructure in place, tasks can be accomplished without preparing dedicated screens. He added that for creators too, the burden is lighter if screen development is no longer needed.

Impressions

What the three companies had in common was that they stopped holding communication mechanisms in-house and redirected that effort to refining their own business operations. I thought ANA's attitude of admitting its current situation by saying it has "not yet caught up" and then saying it would proceed in an agile manner is a useful reference as a realistic way for a large organization to take on change.