Clickatell, a mobile messaging and chat commerce innovator, has launched a chat commerce platform as a service (CCPaaS) that empowers brands to capitalise on the opportunity of chat commerce, the emerging next wave of digital commerce.
This platform enables businesses to connect, interact and transact with their customers on the messaging platforms they already use. Clickatell’s April 2023 release of the Chat Commerce Platform as a Service delivers full, authenticated commerce experiences within the most widely adopted mobile messaging environments. Including WhatsApp, Apple Messages, SMS and USSD.
This next evolution of Clickatell’s chat commerce platform allows businesses to create chat commerce experiences that drive sales and increase customer satisfaction. Businesses can stay ahead of the conversational commerce trend by conducting commerce in the world’s largest messaging apps.
Clickatell’s CCPaaS also allows businesses to save time and reduce costs by providing relevant, in-context brand experiences and secure payment capabilities to their customers through the convenience of messaging. New platform features include card tokenisation and integration with WhatsApp commerce functionalities that allow the display of product information and images in the brand’s WhatsApp channel.
New innovative payments in chat
CCPaaS’ SaaS solution provides secure payment processing by integrating with payment gateways. It allows businesses to efficiently process transactions within the chat interface. With card tokenisation, consumers can securely pay via a link in any messaging channel, leading to a Clickatell-hosted checkout that tokenises the user’s payment information and saves it for future use. This makes subsequent purchases streamlined for the consumer with ‘one tap pay.’
The platform is PCI-DSS, ISO27001 and SOC2 compliant. This ensures the highest security standards for data protection and privacy.
“The launch of Clickatell’s Chat Commerce Platform as a Service marks a significant milestone in our company’s mission to revolutionise customer engagement. We want to continue to facilitate frictionless commerce within messaging apps,” said Pieter de Villiers, CEO and co-founder at Clickatell. “We run our lives within messaging apps; whether arranging a lunch with a friend or scheduling a school drop-off, messaging is convenient and simple.
“Our new platform enables our favourite brands to serve us in these same messaging platforms with a full commerce experience. Such as, checking into your next flight and paying for a seat upgrade. As the first of its kind, CCPaaS sets a new standard for the future of chat commerce. It reinforces Clickatell’s pioneering position in the industry.
“We made history in 2000 when we became the first company to connect the world’s fastest growing commerce platform – the internet – with the world’s fastest growing communications platform – the mobile phone – via our SMS Gateway. I am proud to see our team continuing the innovation and executing on the vision.”
Accelerating digital transformation
“As commerce continues to evolve yet again, we are helping brands to engage with their customers in this emerging chat commerce space,” said Jeppe Dorff, chief product and technology officer at Clickatell. “Our vision has always been to create a chat commerce platform that is focused and built around the key performance metrics that matter most to our customers. Those being performance and operational efficiencies, customer satisfaction and increased business improvements.
“Our Chat Commerce Platform as a Service achieves that vision. But it also provides an unparalleled user experience for both brands and their consumers while fostering digital transformation and in-context communications with the click of a button. With our innovative low/no-code platform, businesses may rapidly implement and customize their chat commerce solutions, regardless of technical expertise.”
Unique features
To address this emerging chat commerce opportunity, Clickatell’s CCPaaS includes several powerful features designed to transform customer engagement into delightful commerce experiences and drive brand loyalty:
- Customisable chatbots: Capabilities to develop and deploy chatbots to automate conversations, handle customer inquiries and drive sales.
- Live agent chat: Smooth escalation from chatbots to live agents. This enables brands to offer personalised and efficient customer support when needed. Live agents can access conversation history and customer information for an enhanced customer experience.
- Real-time analytics and reporting: Access to valuable insights into customer behaviour, chatbot performance and transaction data. This further enables data-driven decisions and optimisation of chat commerce strategies.
- Easy integration with existing systems: A point-and-click embedded solution for seamless integration with CRM, ERP and other business systems. The platform comes pre-integrated with popular solutions like Shopify, Zendesk and Salesforce, ensuring a faster time to market for businesses.
- Embedded payments: Embedding payments into chat allows brands to engage in transactional commerce as easy as a reply to pay. The feature comes with a secure link, hosted order pages, and check out with Order Management integrations. All with a rich user experience in available channels.
