Attendees at Clickatell’s Connect Interact and Transact (CIT) annual event in November heard how chat commerce can assist companies, especially banks, connect with customers who are increasingly demanding a new way of engagement and shifting their trust from traditional organisations to start-ups.
The event, which is normally hosted in Lagos for Clickatell’s Nigerian and other African customers and partners, was hosted virtually this year and chaired by Hannes van Rensburg, Clickatell’s Chief Commercial Officer.
“Covid-19 has changed customers’ buying behaviour and how they interact with brands. For this reason, it has accelerated digital investments for many organisations. Companies are now urgently turning to chat channels to help them meet these new expectations. Clickatell is investing and innovating in this space so we can enable commerce where your customers are,” van Rensburg said.
Featured speaker, Alyson Clarke, principal analyst at Forrester kicked off her keynote titled: The Future of Banking, by sharing some of the company’s research findings. These showed how banking business priorities have changed during the pandemic. Of note was banks accelerating their shift to become digital businesses, ranked as the third top priority post-pandemic, closely following growing revenue and reducing costs.
Forrester states that the next decade in banking will be all about insights and who consumers trust to use them. The organisation says: consumers want personalised experiences and products, with a level of guidance and assistance set by customer preference; that customers expect return on consent and that trust and permission must not be taken for granted. It was also noted that a focus on financial well-being, through advice and in refining products for consumer needs, will define leaders.
A panel discussion following the keynote focussed on the importance of chat when it comes to empowering consumers in a digital world.
Gareth Bray, Business Development and Partnerships at WhatsApp, said: “Meeting your customer where they are is key in all of this. Our findings show that 60% of users choose to message a business rather than pick up the phone. They want to interact with a bank on a device of their choosing, on the platform of their choosing, at a time of their choosing. They want this frictionless, convenient service from any company they may be interacting with.”
Pieter de Villiers, co-founder and CEO at Clickatell confirmed this trend saying chat was faster, simpler and smarter for both the customer and for the bank. He said Clickatell believes banks, particularly in the emerging markets, can increase their reach by a factor of three if they implement chat. “The goal should be no pain for your customer and ultimately zero hold time.”
Clickatell’s West Africa Director, Samson Isa, underpinned these findings when he shared the results of an online poll event attendees had taken earlier. When asked how comfortable their customers were transacting digitally, 60% of attendees responded ‘very comfortable’, 44% responded ‘somewhat comfortable’ and just 6% said their customers were ‘not very comfortable’ transacting digitally.
“We can see that African customers want to engage with brands via digital channels. Enabling chat commerce provides a huge opportunity, particularly for banks in the region,” said de Villiers.
