Clickatell announces Chat Commerce platform with new payment capabilities

In its report “Add Digital Payments as Part of Communications Platform as a Service Offering,” Gartner® recognized Clickatell as a “Who’s Who in CPaaS Payments and How They Are Going About It” section and stated, “Currently there are a limited number of CPaaS providers that provide the payment capability.” Additionally, Gartner’s report predicts “by 2025, around 50% of CPaaS vendors will enable the functionality as part of their communications modules and offerings.” Starting in 2011, Clickatell already recognized the need for chat commerce and moved to the model that combines communication and commerce. Currently, Clickatell processes 1.5 million transactions daily.

“With billions of consumers actively chatting on chat apps, we believe Chat Commerce is the future of digital commerce enabling brands to connect, interact, and transact where their customers are,” said Pieter de Villiers, CEO and co-founder at Clickatell. “Paying a utility bill should not take 15 minutes of your life every month. Imagine a utility company sending a simple notification in chat to customers for the amount due giving them the option to tap and pay the bill right there from within the notification itself. And, if the customer has a query, we enable brands to leverage a bot or live agents then and there in the same channel. Consumers no longer have to scramble to find a number to call or fire off an email into the abyss.”

Clickatell’s enterprise grade Chat Commerce Platform improves brands’ customer experience and drives revenue by personalizing communications, delivering higher customer satisfaction and retention, increasing sales, improving business efficiencies, and reducing operating costs. It provides low/no code tools for brands to connect, interact, and transact with their customers:

1.     Connect enables messaging and notifications, such as a bank sending a customer a credit card transaction verification alert, which is much less intrusive or inefficient than a robocall or an email;

2.     Interact provides back-end system integration and orchestration complete with a chat bot and agent desk enabling a bank, for example, to communicate with customers interactively to check balances or pay bills versus calling an 1800 number on the back of a card; and

3.     Transact supports API payments and digital transactions capabilities through Clickatell’s new Chat 2 Pay. Chat 2 Pay enables businesses to securely accept payments in chat messaging by sending consumers a payment link via SMS or WhatsApp. In its design of Chat 2 Pay, Clickatell efficiently has orchestrated the complex relationship between messaging, payments, and the order management system (OMS) of their customers, and in the process mitigates the risk of businesses managing payment card details.

Recently, IBS Intelligence reported that Clickatell, a leader in mobile communications and chat commerce, and Visa’s global payment and fraud management platform, Cybersource, announced a partnership to make it easier for businesses to deliver chat commerce and contact-free checkouts with Clickatell’s newly announced Chat 2 Pay solution.