Introduction
The world is increasingly conversational today than it has ever been. Traditionally, businesses contacted customers through SMS and emails. With the evolution of technology and of social channels, the way the general population communicates has also dramatically changed. The response rate for traditional methods of communication has dropped staggeringly low. This has pushed businesses towards adapting newer technologies and newer ways to connect with their customer base.
The most used communication channel today is WhatsApp with over 1 billion users around the world. It also has a high retention rate, with about 50% of its users coming back every day after using the app once or twice per week. This messenger has about 450 million daily active users which is a good indicator of why businesses need to leverage WhatsApp as a platform to reach their customers.
Why WhatsApp Business
Because of the application’s gaining popularity and ever-expanding user base, businesses started migrating to WhatsApp to expand their communication probabilities with customers. Witnessing this, WhatsApp released a separate entity for businesses called WhatsApp Business.
Through this business-exclusive application, companies can
- Safely and securely message their customers directly with their end-to-end encryption privacy feature within the platform.
- One advantage over SMS is that WhatsApp is tied directly to a single phone number and provides a branded business profile rather than a string of digits. This allows consumers to immediately know who they are chatting with or receiving messages from.
- WhatsApp also provides reliable delivery information, providing companies the additional benefit of knowing what messages have been delivered and, ultimately, read.
Benefits of WhatsApp Business
WhatsApp integrated with conversational AI offers numerous potential benefits for businesses looking to improve their customer experience.
1. Instant Resolution for FAQs
By integrating conversational AI and WhatsApp, businesses can automate instant responses to frequently requested queries. Once these queries are automated, human agents will not be required to take calls and focus on more pressing issues. With the capability of conversational AI to be available around the clock, businesses can resolve customer queries instantly, no matter what time of the day. For example, with WhatsApp, a healthcare facility can automate FAQs such as customers requesting location, doctor appointments, open hours, and so on while human agents can focus on more important queries regarding medications or other complex questions.
2. Personalized CX
Personalization is the process of tailoring a message or experience to each recipient. It’s about understanding what your customers want and then providing exactly that—without them having to ask for it. Through Integrating conversational AI with WhatsApp, businesses can personalize their customer experiences by
- Understanding who their audience is (e.g., age, gender)
- Analyzing past conversations with previous customers
- Providing personalized content based on their preferences
3. After-sales Support
Providing good customer service is not limited to sales alone. Customer experience is about building and maintaining relationships with customers throughout their journeys with the brands, even after the sales process to avoid customer churn.
Automated WhatsApp conversational AI can be a great resource for after-sales support since customers find it convenient to get in touch with a brand instantly through WhatsApp instead of sending a mail and waiting 24-48 hours for a response.
4. Recovering Abandoned Carts
Cart abandonment is a major issue faced by businesses of all industries where a customer does not complete their buying process. With WhatsApp, businesses can remind customers about the products waiting for them, understand their queries, recommend similar products that match their preferences, and nudge them toward a sale all the while delivering excellent customer experiences.
5. Seamless Agent Hand-off
A smart conversational AI assistant would have the capability to integrate with the business CRM. In this way, when a customer asks a complex query, the AI can hand off the conversation to a human agent and also provide them with the customer’s details instead of asking the customer to repeat their information and queries again. In such a manner, customers can have a seamless experience while getting in touch with the brand through a channel they find the most convenient to use i.e., WhatsApp.
6. Swift Payments
Any business with a subscription model like the financial industry or a retail store would find WhatsApp beneficial in sending automated reminders about dues to their customers. Being the most used messaging application in the world, WhatsApp offers built-in payment gateways that provide several payment modes for customers instead of redirecting them to log in to external websites or applications.
WhatsApp Business API
In the beginning, WhatsApp only benefitted businesses that were small-scale and dependent on the application itself. Since businesses that were medium and large scale could not operate conveniently on the personal messenger version of WhatsApp, the company released a version called WhatsApp Business that was exclusively for commerce.
Through this conversational commerce application, enterprise businesses such as insurance firms or grocery chains, that are rooted in a website of their own, began serving their customers through a multichannel approach, where they were available for their customers through multiple channels such as websites, WhatsApp, and mobile applications. Businesses faced limitations with this approach since the communications through these multiple channels were fragmented and resulted in bitter customers.
An Application Programming Interface (API) was later released to help the channel integrate with other applications, other social media channels, and databases such as a CRM to expand its capabilities. With the help of the WhatsApp Business API, a smart conversational assistant can also be integrated with the application and help in offering an omnipresent approach where customers can pick up where they left off while they switch between multiple channels.
Conclusion
The WhatsApp Business API is a powerful tool for businesses to create, manage and scale their customer relationships. With the API, businesses can enable better collaboration among their sales, marketing, and customer service teams and ultimately achieve better ROI. If you are ready to get started, purpleSlate, partnered with ValueFirst, can help you get your WhatsApp Business app up and running in no time. Get in touch with our team of experts today to take your business to the next level with WhatsApp API with purpleSlate.
