Clickatell leverages CCPaaS to promote digital commerce 

Clickatell, a global leader in mobile messaging and chat commerce innovation,has announced the launch of the world’s first Chat Commerce Platform as a Service (CCPaaS)  that empowers brands to capitalise on the opportunity of chat commerce to enhance digital commerce.

Clickatell, in a statement, said that the  ground-breaking platform enables businesses to seamlessly connect, interact and transact with its customers on the messaging platforms they already use.

According to the chat commerce platform, the newly launched CCPaaS  delivers full, authenticated commerce experiences within the most widely adopted mobile messaging environments, such as WhatsApp, Apple Messages, SMS and USSD, and allows businesses to create chat commerce experiences that drive sales and increase customer satisfaction.

In addition, CCPaaS is the first Software as a service (SaaS) solution to provide secure payment processing by integrating with leading payment gateways, allowing businesses to efficiently process transactions within the chat interface.

Clickatell noted that  the innovation is also designed to  allow 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. It added that the 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.

In light of the above, 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.

Clickatell’s CCPaaS also include several powerful features designed to transform customer engagement into delightful commerce experiences and drive brand loyalty, which includes customisable chatbots, which have  the capabilities to develop and deploy chatbots to automate conversations, handle customer inquiries and drive sales; the live agent chat, which promotes smooth escalation from chatbots to live agents, enabling brands to offer personalised and efficient customer support when needed. It also gives live agents access to  conversation history and customer information for a seamless transition and enhanced customer experience.

The real-time analytics and reporting feature promotes access to valuable insights into customer behavior, chatbot performance and transaction data, enabling data-driven decisions and optimization of chat commerce strategies.

Also, the easy integration feature with existing systems, which is a point and click embedded solution for seamless integration with CRM, ERP and other business systems, comes pre-integrated with popular solutions like Shopify, Zendesk and Salesforce, ensuring a faster time to market for businesses; while the embedded payments feature enhances the embedding of payments into chat, which  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.

The statement further added that Clickatell’s CCPaaS is offered through three distinct packages, which includes Clickatell Connect, also known as the communication package connect, which  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 and number management.

The second is the  Clickatell Interact, which is the engagement package that  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. The package enables  brands to easily and quickly build messaging workflows to deploy chatbots and mini-apps from a low/no-code web interface.The package  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.

The third package which is the  Clickatell Transact, also known as the Commerce package  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 Order Management System (OMS)  integration, businesses can provide unparalleled check out experiences that are fully cloud native and turnkey.

Pieter de Villiers, CEO and Co-Founder at Clickatell, while commenting on the newly launched CCPaaS said the launch of Clickatell’s chat commerce platform as a service marks a significant milestone in the company’s mission to revolutionise customer engagement and facilitate frictionless commerce within messaging apps.

‘‘…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,’’  Villiers added.

On his part, Jeppe Dorff, chief product and technology officer at Clickatell, reiterated the company’s commitment in helping brands to engage with their customers in the emerging chat commerce space.

“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,” Dorff said.