Customer Experience expert, Dan Gingiss, says that you need to engage with your customers on the channels and platforms on which they are active. With 1.5 billion users across 180 countries, WhatsApp is a channel you can’t miss out on. WhatsApp, certainly, is the world’s largest messaging medium with more than 450 million daily users. Marketers are chasing customers to various platforms, WhatsApp tops the list, followed by other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Why WhatsApp?
WhatsApp is now the Go-To messaging platform for most people. It’s come to the point where we’re sending 29 million messages every minute. That’s about 65 billion a day.
This means that people are now more comfortable using WhatsApp than any other platform. So, it makes much more sense for them to be able to interact with you over WhatsApp, rather than forcing them to download your app (let’s face it, we don’t have the storage space or the inclination to get another app). Essentially, engaging your customers over WhatsApp allows you to create a better customer experience.
And interacting with them on WhatsApp has another benefit. The engagement rates are through the roof. While you’d struggle to get a 15% open rate on your emails, WhatsApp messages have an engagement rate of around 70%.
WhatsApp does have certain strategic advantages in some countries. In India, for example, WhatsApp boasts a user base that’s 200 million strong.
What are the benefits of the WhatsApp Chatbot?
WhatsApp business chatbots provide allow businesses to reach out to a wider range of audiences and offer a platform for better customer service. Thereby it helps businesses to create a rapport with customers and turn them into loyalists.
Following are the ways WhatsApp business chatbots can be beneficial for different stakeholders.
Business Owners
WhatsApp Business is available for all businesses despite their size and turnovers. It enables the enterprises to connect with the customers, engage with them and retain them with constant communication.
Chatbots allow businesses to carry out important communication and make businesses available at the fingertips of customers. It becomes easier for business owners to respond to queries and answer the customers' questions without asking them to switch or download the app. WhatsApp bots are also equipped to send broadcasts and outbound notifications to clients. Businesses can send notifications about the order delivery, shipments, payments, etc to customers without using a separate system.
Marketers
WhatsApp chatbots can be an effective channel to generate and connect with more leads for the business. Marketers can send personalized messages and offers & attractive discounts to frequent users or potential leads thereby, generating more sales. WhatsApp chatbots can take up the repetitive work that marketers need to carry out and allow them to focus on more strategic work. Businesses can use multiple formatting options and multimedia options allowing the marketing team to be more creative with their skills. They can also create multiple broadcast lists to execute marketing campaigns and send promotions to customers in one go.
Clients
Clients can gain multiple benefits from connecting with brands via WhatsApp chatbots. Customers can initiate conversations with businesses and get instant resolutions to their queries. Getting instant responses means that customers can have a two-way conversation with businesses which helps them build trust and loyalty toward the brand. As customers are already accustomed to the interface and layout of the WhatApp, they can easily have a conversation with the brand without learning or downloading a new app.
What Is WhatsApp Business API?
WhatsApp API was introduced to help medium to large-scale companies that wanted to use WhatsApp to communicate with multiple customers and create engagement. WhatsApp Business API allows businesses to automate communications, automate replies and send interactive messages.
The main purpose of WhatsApp Business API is to engage with customers eliminating the hassle of them downloading a new app. It allows businesses to create a personalized communication flow that works best for their customers and instantly reply to their queries.
What are the features of WhatsApp business app?
Canned/quick replies
Businesses can automate replies and save templates, quick texts, and auto-responses to customer queries.
Dedicated WhatsApp Business App
WhatsApp Business App comes with additional advantages like creating a store and putting catalogs and business account labels to the account.
Conversation labels
Brands can segregate and gives labels to individuals threads or multiple contacts at once.
Set away messages
Away messages are auto-replies to the customer when there's no rep available from the company's front.
Dedicated business profile/hours
Businesses can put up or set the timing for their online store and inform customers about operational hours.
Great, but what would I use a WhatsApp chatbot for?
Glad you asked! Let’s say you launched a new product or offered a discount..basically, any major announcement. How do you plan on spreading the word to your customers?
Website announcements and social media posts can be effective, but not as much as WhatsApp.
If you get a WhatsApp message, you're probably going to open it.
~ Harper Reed
You can use WhatsApp to share reminders about sales, etc. to your customers. You can use it to share discounts and promotional offers with them. These could be broadcasted to all your customers or targeted via a campaign to specific customers. It becomes even more effective because of the very obvious notifications that WhatsApp sends. It even helps you analyze campaign effectiveness directly on the Engati portal
WhatsApp Marketing is important because of the way we are conditioned towards WhatsApp notifications.
While we might simply swipe an email notification away from our phones, we are far more likely to open a WhatsApp notification and read the message.
If you want to target specific groups of customers with WhatsApp broadcasts, you can even segment your customer base according to user attributes or upload contact lists and add them to campaigns according to user attributes. We’ve even made it possible for you to set your bot up to automatically subscribe users to campaigns on the basis of the actions they take while interacting with message templates on your WhatsApp chatbot. These message templates can even be set up directly from the conversation flow by making use of the Template Message node when you’re building your WhatsApp chatbot.
And now that WhatsApp has permitted sending promotional broadcast messages when using the WhatsApp Business API, you can even send broadcast campaigns with discount offers.
Here’s another reason why you need it. When your customers need help, they don’t want to waste time calling someone up or navigating through your website to find a ‘Contact Us’ section. They want to have their issues resolved in the simplest way possible. If they’re on WhatsApp, you need to be present to provide customer service there as well.
Simplifying sales processes has always been linked to higher amounts of sales generated.
Your customers want you to make it easier for them to buy your offerings. They want to buy your offerings; you're just making it to hard for them to do it.
And how better to simplify the sales process than to empower your customers to make purchases over WhatsApp?
All you need to do is display your catalog over the bot and integrate your chatbot with Stripe or another payment gateway. Then as soon as they select the product, they'll be taken to the payment page.
Customers are rapidly shifting towards conversational commerce. That leaves you a choice - adopt it now or get left behind.
As soon as a customer places an order over an e-commerce portal, there's one thought that constantly plagues their mind - "Will it be delivered on time?".
Sure, they could track their orders by visiting your website or downloading your mobile app. But that involves too much effort. Besides, who has space for yet another app on their phones?
They're already using WhatsApp...why don't you just send them shipping updates right there?
It eases their anxiety with minimum effort on their behalf and creates a better experience for them. But that's not all.
The transparency that you provide by doing this will even increase their trust in your business.
So, do you need to build a WhatsApp chatbot?
Even if you think you’re a smaller business and could handle your clients without a WhatsApp chatbot, you do need to realize that customers today, are spoilt. We want what we want when we want it. We don’t wait for anybody.
So, if you’re unable to interact with customers at odd hours, you could lose out on their business. Besides, your time would be better spent doing something more productive than answering questions mechanically. Here's an article highlighting the best WhatsApp chatbot platforms.
Here's a good article on how to verify your WhatsApp Business Account!
Making it even better
Engati even helps you create your WhatsApp chatbot at an unbelievable price! We're providing amazing capabilities, detailed analytics, and smooth customer experiences at the lowest price.
Reach your customers on a platform they love and take your business to the next level, with the help of your very own WhatsApp bot.
Download our exclusive ebook for free! (Worth $199)
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