Clickatell announces Chat Commerce Platform with New Payment Capabilities

Clickatell has announced it will unveil new payment capabilities via its Chat Commerce Platform.

Clickatell helps businesses easily deploy payments in chat channels with low to no execution risk associated with regulatory considerations, payment ecosystem of payer and payees, and consumer adoption on the most popular chat channels.

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.

“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.”