Twenty years ago, Clickatell 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.
Today, Clickatell is pioneering chat commerce – the biggest transformative chapter in the unfolding digital economy – to enable brands to connect, interact, and transact with their customers on mobile messaging and chat channels, anywhere, reliably, securely, and in real-time on the world’s most popular chat apps.
Consumers spend 90% of their screen time on five mobile apps, and chat apps rank number one. They prefer digital commerce experiences and expect to be able to buy goods and access services 24×7 from anywhere.
A recent Aberdeen research report, “Maximize the ROI of Chat in Commerce Activities,” indicates that companies incorporating chat capabilities enjoy 75% greater year-over-year growth in annual revenue and 89% greater annual growth in cross-sell and up-sell revenue.
“Chat commerce is how availability for financial opportunities will unfold for the next billion people,” says Pieter de Villiers, co-founder and CEO at Clickatell.
Covid-19 has accelerated digital transformation across businesses around the world, including digital commerce, and people are embracing commerce via chat. “The next billion people and millions of merchants will not be onboarded through websites, email, and point of sale devices, but through digital and chat commerce experiences,” de Villiers adds.
Despite the pandemic, Clickatell is experiencing rapid growth and recently appointed Glen Braganza as CFO and Jennifer Shambroom as CMO. The veterans of fintech, payments, and the mobile ecosystem respectively bring substantial insight and leadership to position Clickatell for further growth.
De Villiers believes a technology company does not survive and grow amidst two decades of technology disruptions if it does not continue to innovate. Clickatell’s recent innovations include the launches of chat commerce, chat banking, and chat self-service solutions and products. In addition, Clickatell’s unique low/no code digital engagement and payment orchestration capabilities make it fast and easy for leading brands to deploy the company’s chat commerce experiences in minutes rather than days.
“We aim to grow by ten times in the next six years. A larger Clickatell can have a bigger and better impact in the world,” concluded de Villiers.
Clickatell milestones:
* 2000: Became the first to connect internet businesses with consumers on mobile using SMS that could be implemented with four lines of code.
* 2012: Pioneered global SMS API offering and award-winning mobile payments and distribution platform Transact.
* 2017: Developed proprietary technology for natural language understanding and in-chat application delivery as part of its Touch platform.
* 2018: Introduced the world’s first chat banking solution: ABSA.
* 2019: Became the premier enabler of chat commerce in emerging markets.
* 2019: Became the first to bring chat commerce capabilities to the telecom sector: MTN South Africa.