Future of Business is Chat Commerce, Says New Clickatell Survey

Imagine the ability to buy airline tickets, order dinner, see if your favorite clothing retailer has any sales, and confirm your checking account balance, all in minutes through the chat app you use every day on your phone. No need to download and juggle between multiple apps made by different companies, visit a website, or call customer service. This is chat commerce – quick, seamless, and personalized experiences to meet your needs.

What is chat commerce? Simply put, it’s a modern way for businesses to engage with their customers using popular chat applications. Chat commerce is on-demand and real-time engagement and transactions with businesses that take place on customers’ preferred chat apps on their mobile phones.

Millennials Love Chat + Commerce

Clickatell has just announced its second Chat Commerce Trends Report, a survey focused on how chat is used by more than 1,000 US Millennial (26 to 39-year-old) smartphone users that use chat apps at least weekly and are from a mix of incomes and education levels. Millennials, also known as digital natives, are almost never without their mobile phones and chat apps are their new standard for communication. Our survey reveals Facebook Messenger is the chat app Millennials use most often.

How popular is chat for Millennials? Of those surveyed, 71% use chat apps every day and 86% use chat for much more than just chatting.

Opportunities for Businesses

Always in Millennials’ hands, the phone is for communicating, shopping, reading the news, and enjoying every medium of entertainment. This lifestyle isn’t lost on major businesses who are always monitoring consumer trends and behaviors, especially for a group that holds a massive $1.4 trillion in purchasing power. The survey found 89% want to do business on chat. This result speaks volumes about the opportunities ahead for businesses, from airlines to restaurants, retail, banks, and everything in between.

Essentially, the chat app typically used for texting back and forth with family, friends, and co-workers becomes a sales channel, where businesses can take orders, promote products, process returns, and answer questions. Banking can conduct a full menu of transactions, including money transfers, make payments, confirm deposits and more. Most importantly, it’s all streamlined on the customer’s chat app of-choice, including WhatsApp, Apple iMessage, and Facebook Messenger.

Chat Commerce in High Demand for Travel Businesses

For travel businesses, a comprehensive digital strategy that ensures their brand is more accessible is paramount. They’re also facing the reality that Millennials' attention is on experiences that make engaging with the travel business easy and seamless. The benefit of chat apps is they help rapidly boost revenue and enhance customer experience. As the survey shows, consumers want to do many things with travel businesses via a chat app.

Additionally, of those surveyed, top companies they want to make purchases with are travel business as well as restaurants – more so than with hotels.

Clickatell, Your Chat Commerce Partner

There are only a handful of technology companies with the chat technology experience to help travel businesses and other companies turn their digital strategy into a customer service offering. Our Chat Commerce Platform successfully brings chat commerce capabilities to major national airlines, banks and telecoms, as well as smaller regional retailers and media streaming services in the US, South Africa, Nigeria and other parts of the world.

Our Chat Commerce Platform enables millions of transactions each year, and we see a huge opportunity to grow these services with businesses that are looking for innovative and highly efficient ways to connect with their customers.

As our society barrels towards mobile-always cultures, the need for businesses to pivot from the old school ways of engaging with consumers is more important than ever before. Clickatell’s Chat Commerce Platform, with its ability to put brands directly where their customers are spending their time most, makes for a very promising solution. And future.