According to a 2020 report by IFC and Google, Africa’s digital economy could be worth $180 billion by 2025.
CNN’s Connecting Africa looks at the initiatives and strategies e-commerce companies are taking to connect African consumers with online products and learns what needs to be done to increase online access, seamlessly deliver purchased goods, and expand product offerings across the continent.
CNN’s Eleni Giokos spoke with tech savvy businesses about accessing the fast-growing youth population in Africa.
Clickatell in South Africa is leveraging messaging platforms to connect businesses with customers.
Pieter de Villiers, one of the co-founders of Clickatell, explains how they utilise this ‘chat commerce’,
“We provide all the toolkits that you need to create the entire customer journey from discovery to ordering a product, to giving a survey, to checking out on that chat platform that you and I already use every single day.”
The company has evolved to provide brands with the technology to engage with their customers through messaging platforms.
He continues on the increasing demand to provide consumers with mobile interactions and transactions, “Today we do more than 1.5 million payments per day. We service more than 60 million active customers for many banks across that market. We’ve $130 million plus business with SMS. We had multiple countries presence in the US, Canada, Nigeria, South Africa.”
The director of communications at Clickatell, Rozz Atanassova, explains the role of AI in promoting the future of e-commerce, “Clickatell is really excited in leveraging AI across the African continent due to the diverse nature of the African continent. So, there are lots of different cultures, lots of different languages, different dialects and AI really provides us the ability to help businesses better communicate with their consumers. So, we are looking at leveraging private AI so that it still feels secure and safe and encrypted to help businesses enable use cases with real time sentiment.”
Atanassova and de Villiers end the interview by explaining the success of chat commerce, “There isn’t a vertical that we currently don’t engage with and that hasn’t found chat is to be an effective way to get to their customers.”
De Villiers furthers this within the context of the continent, “I’m the eternal optimist in terms of Africa’s potential, not just South Africa, but Africa’s potential. I think that with our diaspora and our borderless trade that’s happening, there’s incredible opportunities. So, with these technologies that break down barriers, that break down borders, and they really bring an equal playing ground for the average man and woman on the street to be able to find the best services and the best quality of care they deserve.”
This interview was featured in a recent episode of Connecting Africa on CNN International.
