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A billion people, mostly millennials and Gen Zers, message businesses across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram every week. It’s an order of magnitude hard to wrap your head around. The question is, Are you one of those businesses? Probably not, or at least not on the scale you’d like. The shift to chat commerce as a primary channel is long overdue.

On the consumer side, chat is quick, easy and instantly gratifying — frictionless, in the parlance of the marketing set — and greases the wheels for a great customer relationship. Every successful interaction builds upon brand loyalty and trust.

The Big Book of Chat Commerce

Don’t take my word for it, just look at what’s happening. Airlines like KLM and FlySafair use WhatsApp to deliver boarding passes, check-in and upsell offers. South Africa’s Absa Bank provides a rich suite of WhatsApp banking services. Retailers are managing loyalty programs, orders and personalized deals through chat. What could you be doing?

These real-world examples come from “The Big Book of Chat Commerce 2025,” a newly released ebook from Clickatell, endorsed by the CMO Council. We’re high on chat commerce because, despite its already immense size, there’s still huge growth potential.

It’s crazy that chat commerce remains untapped by the majority of brands. Far too many marketers are stuck in the old mindset that they own the channel. Stop trying to get people to download your app or, worse, drive them to your contact center. In today’s world, you need to meet people where they are — on uber popular chat apps.

AI Turbocharges the Empathy Engine

If marketers think they’ve missed the boat, don’t fret. A new era of chat commerce is just getting underway. It’s an exciting evolution infusing AI for hyper-personalized, humanized, intuitive, suggestive, in-the-moment engagement that elicits empathy with the consumer.

And that’s only the half of it. AI helps automate chat commerce for continuous global availability and maximum efficiency, leading to more frequent interactions, including payment transactions. Since chat messaging generates valuable data such as precise customer inquiries and responses, AI can continuously optimize outcomes through data feedback loops.

Overall, chat commerce lowers the cost to serve (especially when compared to phone support, which costs anywhere from $5 to $25 per call), increases revenue and conversion rates (especially when considering personalized recommendations convert at rates 10% to 15% higher than passive browsers), and enhances customer lifetime value.

The Guiding Principle: Removing Friction

Sounds exciting, right? To get started, you’ll want to download “The Big Book of Chat Commerce 2025.” There are examples of practical use cases, recommendations, challenges, and a lot more. Advice ranges from mapping customer journeys through chat messaging platforms to adopting a conversational tone, including utilizing emojis, GIFs, and voice notes.

“Gartner research indicates 73% of consumers prioritize speed and convenience, underlining the need for businesses to streamline experiences relentlessly,” as stated in the report. “The guiding principle should be continually removing friction points, waiting times, required downloads, or complex sign-up processes, to respect customer time and convenience.”

Challenging Chat Checklist

While chat commerce appears simple and easy, there are a lot of underlying considerations and groundwork to be done. Successful chat commerce requires integration with legacy systems, data security and privacy, consistency, the ability to handle message volume spikes, among others.

The good news is chat commerce’s tools are here. The demand is clear. The payoff in cost savings, customer satisfaction and revenue growth is undeniable. Chat commerce is a massive movement that’s quietly reshaping how businesses connect with consumers.

But to truly capitalize, marketers need to let go of outdated thinking, meet customers where they are, and lean into the combined power of chat and AI to build meaningful, frictionless relationships at scale.

DOWNLOAD “The Big Book of Chat Commerce 2025” today