Drive Sales with Payments and Transactions in Chat

Win Customers with Chat Commerce 

On October 13, 2021, we recorded a must-see webinar about how conversations in chat are shaping our daily lives and why it is important for brands to integrate transactional digital channel strategies in chat. With chat having become the largest digital platform in the world, brands will enjoy success by meeting customers on their level through chat channels.

Featuring guest speaker Julie Ask, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, the discussion with Clickatell’s Jeppe Dorff, Chief Product and Technology Officer, and guest speaker Ben Laluc, Vice President, Product for Digital Commerce at Cybersource, covered customer service, payments, and transactions in chat, and how businesses should meet customers where they are and address consumers’ ever-increasing expectations.

Throughout the conversation, moderated by Andreas Suma, Senior Vice President at Clickatell, the executives shared key insights, including:

With over 3.2 billion smartphone users, 2 billion WhatsApp users, and 1.3 billion Facebook Messenger users, according to Statista, customer support is the most common use for chat amongst retailers and brands these days, both for pre- and post-purchase. Customers can find out whether a product they are after is available, receive information on operating hours for a business, and track the order status of their deliveries with ease.

But as chat shifts from the sphere of customer support and into the realm of more complex customer service, brands that take a proactive approach to their experience will be at the forefront when it comes to finding success with today’s customers. While some businesses are still trying to work out how to optimize email, IBR or other existing channels, their customers have most likely already forgotten about them and moved on. Therefore, to hold the attention of transient customers it is critical to be more methodical with your engagement than ever before. But how?

Build their trust
Trust is earned over time – something your customers don’t have. Therefore, automated experiences on chat need to be actionable and quick. If your brand comes across as mindful of the customer’s time and doesn’t inundate them with irrelevant information that won’t serve the purpose of your interaction, they’ll come to trust your business for the deliberate ways you go about solving their problems and getting them what they need.

Get personal
Chat highlights precise information to simplify and personalize shopping and tailors recommendations based on what your customer wants. Most importantly, it improves the consistency of what agents can offer and the ability to sell. Now, you can serve your customers from anywhere they are, in the moment, and give them what they want, what they expect and what they didn’t know they needed.

Meet their expectations for success
One great experience is all it takes. If customers know a brand caters to them and allows for an easy and secure shopping and engagement experience, they’ll be back for more. Become customer obsessed. Make the entire journey convenient for them. Don’t just make the pre- and post-purchase experiences available through chat. Get customers to make their actual payments through that channel too instead of on a website or via a call center. Fast responses, curated recommendations, and advising customers toward products they desire will lead to immense satisfaction, greater loyalty, higher conversion rates, and lower return rates.

 Now all you need to do for your business and customers is take the next digital step, which leads us to Chat 2 Pay.

Delight them with Chat 2 Pay, pay-by-link capability
Clickatell’s solution, Chat 2 Pay, gives merchants the opportunity to deliver their own, unique experience to customers. Thanks to the partnership with Cybersource, Chat 2 Pay enables businesses to provide consumers the convenience of effortless, contact-free, and secure payments via text messaging and chat channels on mobile phones, including widely used chat apps. Chat 2 Pay provides less friction and more payment conversion, acting as an extension of a call center embedded in the CRM or OMS of a business. As an advancement of chat channel management, it lets you cater to consumers who either utilize existing apps or don’t, sending them a link in chat to a secure payment page, empowering your customers to place orders on the spot and pay securely.

Customers want their real-life experiences in stores to be replicated online, which is why the future is bright for payments and transactions done through chat. Tomorrow, conversational interfaces in chat will be able to handle more complex user questions by incorporating computational photography or an understanding of what customers have bought in the past to provide chat users with a natural, more human experience. But today, chat gives us a faster, safer, easier, and more efficient experience to make the payments that matter the most to us.

Watch the webinar now to find out how you can build on relationships and engagement with your customers by providing them with an experience they haven’t only come to expect, but won’t forget.