How Chat Commerce is Changing E-Commerce

Your customers use chat services daily to communicate with family and friends. The most popular chat app, WhatsApp, has over 2 billion global users and users check in, on average, more than 23 times each day. Chat apps are beloved because they are easy to use and offer quick, efficient communication. They have changed many aspects of our lives, including the way we shop for products. Chat commerce has made it easier than ever for customers to find what they are looking for and purchase items from your company. Are you taking full advantage of chat commerce for your business? Find out. And see why doing so helps increase conversions and solidifies customer loyalty.

What Is Chat Commerce?

Chat commerce refers to brands that use messaging or chat channels to connect with their customers via chat to support their customers’ interactions as they search for and learn more about products and services, resolve queries and disputes, place orders, make purchases, and track or return their orders. By using chat commerce capabilities, transformative businesses can cement their new and existing customer relationships by servicing and transacting quickly and efficiently. When you make it as easy to communicate with your company as it is to send a message, your revenue increases. Chat commerce lets customers connect to the products they want within chat apps they use all the time. All without opening (or even downloading) your merchant-specific app, visiting your website, or going to a physical retail location.

How Chat Commerce Impacts Shoppers

Service:

For brands, chat commerce results in better customer service, convenience, improved engagement, increased revenue, and significant cost savings. Businesses enable their customers to get things done in a simpler, smarter, more convenient way than 1-800 call centers and website experiences. They never have to place their customers on hold again.

Brands also can send promotional offers straight to consumers who may not even know about discounts offered.

Research:

Shoppers usually research a product or service before making a purchase. Chat commerce provides the opportunity for your brand to answer frequently asked questions in real-time. What is more, you can do so without adding extra burden to your customer service team and in a way that’s exceedingly cost effective. You can also prompt customers with updates on special offers and discounts to help nudge them towards conversion.

Recognition:

Customers want the same experience in-store as they do visiting a business’ website on a desktop or via mobile. Know and service them where they spend most of their time – in chat. If they connect with a business in a chat channel they have an opportunity to be recognized during their interactions with the business. Utilize chat solutions via SMS messaging or chat in your customer’s favorite chat app in the contact center to quickly demonstrate a customer-first approach. Chat is where your customers are.

Purchasing:

Brands can improve their customer service with payments in chat. Clickatell’s Chat 2 Pay provides a more convenient and secure way to make payments in chat messaging. Clickatell’s Chat 2 Pay enables merchants to securely accept payments in chat messaging by sending consumers a payment link via SMS or WhatsApp. The functionality is so easy merchants simply switch it on and manage.

Personalization:

The contact center offers an important opportunity to serve your customers as individuals. Chat solutions deliver personalization during every interaction, allowing businesses to communicate with each individual and deliver a personal experience during every interaction and back-and-forth engagement. Personalized chat helps businesses create differentiation in their customer support experience.

How Chat Commerce Impacts Brands

Chat commerce is just as impactful for your business as it is for your customers. It lets you provide instant, personal customer service and connection—at minimal cost and in a way that saves time for your customer service team.

Chat commerce connects with your customers on a more personal level, using the same app they use to connect each day to family and friends. Customers can ask questions about products and receive quick, get efficient answers, and feel like valued as individuals rather than just another number in a long list of buyers.

Deliver Better Customer Experience:

Companies can provide better customer service by monitoring and responding to customers in real-time. You essentially guide them through the sales process, right through purchase. This can be done with the integration of bots that can handle simple inquiries and frequent needs and then seamlessly hand-off a customer to a live customer service rep when the situation calls for it. Chat commerce also enables you to capture feel what your customers are interested in and asking you about, enabling you to focus and refine your marketing and support efforts.

Differentiate yourself from the competition:

Customers want and have come to expect a truly personalized shopping experience. Chat commerce helps you recreate the one-on-one personalized attention of in-person shopping, including the ability to recommend specific products based on customer comments and input. Because this is done in a conversational style, not only is it personal, but it is also effective.

Increase sales:

When compared to alternate forms of communicating with customers, chat is by far the most responsive. Open rates in chat are also much higher than in email. According to Gartner, emails can have open rates that are lower than 20 percent, while messaging has an open rate as high as 98 percent.

The Clickatell Advantage

Clickatell’s Chat Commerce Platform will help you put your brand in the chat apps that your customers love. With chat commerce, today’s mobile-first, mobile-always customers enjoy convenient digital customer support, account management, and transaction services from within chat.

Clickatell is uniquely suited to help you take advantage of chat commerce through WhatsApp and other chat channels, with tools and solutions built to scale with you.

The Clickatell WhatsApp business API enables you to take advantage of the channel’s chat capabilities.

Our Chat Desk is one of the most advanced digital contact center solutions in the world. It helps reduce contact center costs, lets customers get information and resolve issues more quickly, and gives your contact center greater flexibility to manage teams, call volume, and increase satisfaction.

Our drag-and-drop visual tool, Clickatell Chat Flow, simplifies the process of rolling out cross-channel customer journeys from one that requires weeks or months to one that can be designed and deployed by a non-technical business user on a rapid timeframe.

Reach out to Clickatell today find out how we can help your company take advantage of the growing benefits of chat commerce.