As mobile communications and chat commerce group Clickatell celebrates its twentieth anniversary, it is leveraging the growth of the chat economy, which is presenting one of the most fertile commercial opportunities of the digital era.

Chat commerce – business-consumer engagement on the various chat channels often installed on mobile phones – as opposed to traditional commerce, is game changing, particularly in Africa, where data is often limited, says Clickatell cofounder and CEO Pieter de Villiers.

Clickatell, which became the first company to connect the Internet to the mobile phone 20 years ago, is pioneering chat commerce to enable brands to connect, interact and transact with their customers on their preferred mobile messaging and chat channels.

“Consumers spend 90% of their screen time on five mobile applications, and chat apps rank number one,” he says.

With more than five-billion people worldwide actively using chat apps, mostly WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or WeChat, on a daily basis, there is a seismic shift in consumer behaviour in relation to commerce, communication and interaction.

“[Consumers] prefer digital commerce experiences and expect to be able to buy goods and access services 24/7 from anywhere, expecting a high degree of convenience in the way they are served with goods and services.”

Further, a large percentage of these users are also using these chat channels to communicate and undertake financial transactions, he adds.

De Villiers comments that chat messaging simplifies customer engagement, eliminating the need for interactions through email, phone calls, live agents or other high-friction customer interactions.

Businesses are increasingly working to capitalise on this to improve customer engagement and response, strengthen brand loyalty and generate revenue.

He cites the outcomes of a recent Aberdeen research report, ‘Maximise the ROI of Chat in Commerce Activities’, which shows that chat commerce turns “chatting with customers into purchases”.

The report shows that the use of chat capabilities reduces the response time to customer requests by more than 2.7 times, improves the percentage of customer requests addressed without the need for repeated requests by 3.1 times, decreases customer efforts by 10.8 times and grows customer retention rates by 48% year-on-year.

Further, companies that incorporate chat capabilities into their operations achieve 75% greater year-on-year growth in yearly revenue and 89% greater yearly growth in cross-sell and up-sell revenue.

Firms in the Asia-Pacific and Europe, and the Middle East and Africa regions have the lead in chat adoption, with 77% and 76% respectively using it. In North America and Latin America, 67% and 63% of firms in the respective regions use one or more of the chat capabilities available.

The report also indicates that firms with chat-enabled commerce activities report greater improvements in their marketing effectiveness, recording a 20.7 times greater year-on-year increase in return on marketing investment.

Chat commerce enables brands to target customers where they already are, instead of trying to entice potential consumers to visit websites, place phone calls or enter mobile applications.

“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. [In addition], chat commerce is how availability for financial opportunities will unfold for the next billion people,” De Villiers explains.

Clickatell’s recent innovations to enable businesses and consumers to interact 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,” concludes De Villiers.