Clickatell 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 ground-breaking platform enables businesses to seamlessly connect, interact and transact with their customers on the messaging platforms they already use.
Clickatell’s April 2023 release of the first Chat Commerce Platform as a Service delivers full, authenticated commerce experiences within the most widely adopted mobile messaging environments, such as 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 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 tokenization and integration with WhatsApp commerce functionalities that allow the display of product information and images in the brand’s WhatsApp channel.
New payments in Chat
CCPaaS is the first SaaS solution to provide secure payment processing by integrating with leading payment gateways, allowing businesses to efficiently process transactions within the chat interface. With card tokenization, consumers can securely pay via a link in any messaging channel, leading to a Clickatell-hosted checkout that tokenizes the user’s payment information and saves it for future use — making subsequent purchases streamlined for the consumer with ‘one tap pay.’ The platform is PCI-DSS, ISO27001 and SOC2 compliant, ensuring 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 and 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 favorite 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 and 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.”
Simple CCPaaS packaging for customers’ needs
Clickatell’s CCPaaS is offered through three distinct packages:
- Clickatell Connect – The Communication Package – Connect is the foundation package that enables businesses to send and receive enterprise-grade mobile messages over multiple messaging channels via a RESTful API or a web-based campaign management tool. This package delivers high-volume services and campaigns, adhering to strict security and compliance requirements, delivering billions of messages reliably to customers all over the world. Key features include high volume queuing and routing, message encryption, anonymous messaging, number management, and brand visibility across all channels, as well the rich chat features such as list pickers and location sharing.
- Clickatell Interact – The Engagement Package – Adding to Connect, the Interact package enables businesses to have meaningful conversations with their consumers delivering the kind of digital experiences that today’s mobile-first consumers have come to expect. Brands can now easily and quickly build messaging workflows to deploy chatbots and mini-apps from a low/no-code web interface. Interact allows an instantaneous response to the customer through a chatbot with powerful features including keyword management, assets library and integrations with leading CRM and OMS solutions. Interact also includes live agent enablement through an advanced web-based application that provides real time sentiment insights, agent assist, chat transfers and agent performance metrics, all designed to improve agent performance and drive better customer experience.
- Clickatell Transact – The Commerce Package – Transact enables businesses to sell products and services directly within messaging channels by sending the customer a payment prompt that initiates a secure and simple payment experience. Transact builds on the foundation of Connect and Interact, allowing businesses to create full commerce experiences within messaging. Businesses can accept payments on the Clickatell Platform with no development required, and with secure link and OMS integration, businesses can provide unparalleled check out experiences that are fully cloud native and turnkey. State-of-the-art payment capabilities include tokenization for frictionless user experience, PCI-DSS security and GDPR and local privacy compliance and legacy processes integration.
“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; performance and operational efficiencies, customer satisfaction and increased business improvements. Our Chat Commerce Platform as a Service not only achieves that vision, 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 customise their chat commerce solutions, regardless of technical expertise.”
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, enabling brands to offer personalised and efficient customer support when needed. Live agents can access conversation history and customer information for a seamless transition and enhanced customer experience.
- Real-time analytics and reporting: Access to valuable insights into customer behaviour, chatbot performance and transaction data, enabling 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, check out with Order Management integrations and a rich user experience in available channels.