Optimizing WhatsApp Chatbots for More Rewarding CX
AHJ George
Optimizing WhatsApp Chatbots for a More Rewarding Customer Experience
WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps in the world. With the chance to connect with some 2.4 billion unique active users, this free communication platform is an obvious venue for outreach, especially if you use WhatsApp chatbots to make the connection.
WhatsApp chatbots can be a powerful tool for businesses to improve customer experiences, raise satisfaction, and increase sales – provided that you build yours the right way. Just as you'd train a contact center agent to handle business in the most lucrative way possible, you'll need to optimize your bots to navigate the twists and turns of informal conversation on WhatsApp. Here's how.
What Are WhatsApp Chatbots?
Chatbots build on various forms of artificial intelligence to achieve different communication goals, like interpreting a user's input and responding accordingly or learning from past conversations to provide more relevant answers. They can also personalize brand responses based on the user's preferences and interests – without forgetting key details like human agents are prone to doing.
WhatsApp chatbots are computer programs that can converse with humans in a seamless, organic way via the WhatsApp platform. These bots can have any conversation you want them to, but many focus on a key business goal: automating customer service and support tasks.
WhatsApp's success makes it possible to build an outreach strategy atop existing groundwork. You don't have to build the venue, you just have to show up and be willing to engage.
Bots make it easier to do this consistently. They let you respond, initiate conversation, and track outreach performance data even if you're just a small startup – or running a contact center with a skeleton crew while you tackle more important issues.
Why Do Businesses Need WhatsApp Chatbots?
WhatsApp chatbots are critical for enterprises that want to take advantage of WhatsApp's high market penetration. As one of the leading messaging apps, the platform plays host to billions of potential customers – not to mention business partners and potential employee talent.
While you might be able to sustain your business without tapping into this huge user base, you're not doing yourself any favors in the process. WhatsApp chatbots can help you make your mark on the modern marketplace without missing out on a competitive advantage your rivals are almost certainly leveraging.
With so many businesses using messaging apps to communicate with customers, not having a chatbot could make your brand seem disengaged – or worse, uncaring. Remember: Today's shoppers demand a more personalized approach to the customer experience.
Implementing a chatbot for your business helps you satisfy this bare minimum. Considering that WhatsApp is free, why wouldn't you want to level the playing field and provide your customers with the same convenient experience they've come to expect from other companies?
High-Impact WhatsApp Chatbot Use cases
Brands that use WhatsApp chatbots gain several specific advantages in addition to the broader benefits mentioned above. Although every company use case is different, you might use chatbots to:
Save time by automating tasks that would otherwise require human intervention. For instance, chatbots can answer frequently asked questions, provide customer service, and even take orders without you having to dedicate one of your valuable team members to the job. This frees up time for your team to focus on other tasks.
Improve customer satisfaction by providing quick and efficient customer service. Customers appreciate being able to get answers to their questions quickly and easily without having to wait on hold to reach a human representative.
Increase sales and revenue by taking orders and processing payments directly through the chat interface. Customers are more likely to make a purchase if they can do so quickly and easily without having to leave the app they’re already using. This is yet another case that demonstrates the value of going to where your audience is.
Many of the most impactful chatbot use cases are highly industry-specific. For instance:
A healthcare chatbot might answer common questions about symptoms, treatments, and doctors,
A retail chatbot could help customers find products, track orders, and return items,
A local government might build a chatbot to give constituents information about services, benefits, programs, or even emergency alerts,
A utility company's chatbot could let customers pay bills, report outages, and schedule repairs,
A delivery service might use its chatbot system to make it easier for recipients to track packages, estimate arrival times, and reroute deliveries, or
A school or other educational institution might build a multilingual chatbot to provide international students with information about courses and programs.
Driving the Conversation Toward Profitable Ends: Creating Bot Content Tailored to Your Business Needs
As amazing and mystical as the underlying AI may seem, chatbots aren't magic – They can't work their wonders without a lot of planning and architecting.
So what defines a great business bot? Mind these fundamentals when optimizing your WhatsApp chatbots for a more successful customer experience:
Make sure the chatbot is easy to use and understand: The bot must be able to answer common questions and handle simple tasks without making mistakes. Your bots should also provide an escape hatch: If users feel their questions aren't being answered properly or simply want to talk to a human agent, the transition needs to be seamless.
Use images, videos, and audio to make the chatbot more engaging: Ever find yourself hunting for something to say during a lull in a text message conversation? While this is the norm for chats with your friends or relatives, it's a death knell for customer outreach, so keep things flowing and reinforce your existing branding with clever rich media inserts.
Use data from customer interactions to constantly improve the chatbot experience: Machine learning that doesn't actually learn from its past inevitably falls short of its potential. Your AI needs to be able to build on prior conversations and even other sources, like consumer intake forms or your marketing research. This not only makes the bots feel more natural but also saves customers from the frustration of having to repeat themselves.
Make sure the chatbot is available 24/7 so that customers can get help whenever they need it: Those billions of WhatsApp users aren't guaranteed to all be in your same locale or even time zone. Welcome all comers by accommodating them with bots that can respond anytime.
Ditch the generic: Take a cue from your call center strategy or marketing campaigns by teaching your bots to use language specific to your domain while keeping things as accessible as possible. Remember that your bots represent your brand, so aim for programs that give you an appropriate air of authority and expertise without losing sight of the casual tone that gives WhatsApp its massive appeal.
Staying on Track: Essential Guidelines for Creating Your WhatsApp Chatbot
WhatsApp offers businesses a fast, simple, and secure way to communicate with their customers around the world, but it's not all easy sailing – You will have to jump through some hoops:
Get Access to the API
First, you need to get access to the WhatsApp Business API or the WhatsApp Cloud API. These APIs let you build your own integrations that work with WhatsApp, serving as the critical link between your bots and your higher-level organizational strategy.
You can do this by registering for a free account on the WhatsApp website. Then, you'll generate a unique API key that will allow you to access the WhatsApp APIs. Also, check out our article on the distinctions between the Cloud API and the Business API here. [Please link to WhatsApp Cloud API article]
Verify Your Business
Next, you need to verify your business on WhatsApp and register your contact information. Once you've confirmed your account, you can start using the WhatsApp chatbot features by programming a bot that interacts with the platform via the API of your choosing.
Take Your Work for a Test Drive or Two
Finally, before you deploy your chatbot, it's vital to put it through its paces. One easy way to confirm the basic functionality is to send test messages to yourself or other users who have agreed to help stress-test your chatbot.
Testing helps ensure that your chatbot is working properly before all your customers interact with it – but what should you be looking for?
For starters, you'll want to ensure all of your brand content and rich media displays properly and matches up with the flow of the conversation. If you're using a bot to handle sensitive data or customer-specific information, ensure it's providing the right details to the correct account holders and not potentially exposing secrets.
Remember that automating your testing strategy is probably a good idea if you plan on connecting with customers at scale. Even if the bot works flawlessly, it's only as useful as the information you feed it, so now is the time to get your back-end integrations running as smoothly as possible – which may demand hundreds or thousands of tests. Choosing a platform that lets you achieve this automatically is the easiest option.
The Benefits of Working in the Cloud
WhatsApp gives businesses multiple options for how they deploy their chatbots. While there are good reasons to keep everything on-premises, like retaining control over your client data, there are also advantages to using the cloud version of the WhatsApp toolkit – or an integration you can count on to do the work for you:
Companies can connect with customers fairly easily: You can send automated messages to customers without having to worry about maintaining a separate database or server. Since Meta hosts everything on their servers, you don't have to put in extra effort to scale up, such as when you're experiencing a seasonal sales rush.
Businesses don't have to worry about logistics or service quality: One of the problems with hosting everything on-premises is that it can lead to a sluggish user experience. Meta's global networks make it infinitely simpler to deliver expedient, locale-aware content no matter where the users may be.
You don't pay as much: WhatsApp may be free, but servers aren't – and neither is the maintenance work that goes into their upkeep. If you'd like to get started on a budget, then the cloud approach is a great option.
Solve the Lead Generation Conundrum for Good
Drumming up business can be tough no matter what industry you're in. Chatbots let you generate leads in a few different ways, making it easier to assess your business prospects and learn where to invest:
Engage with potential leads. Program your chatbots to ask people questions about their needs and pain points. By using intelligent programming to understand the meaning inherent in people's responses, you can build bots that easily determine which of your products or services might fit the bill – and offer suggestions that are more likely to be positively received.
Nurture leads by providing valuable, informative content relevant to their interests. People don't always want to be marketed to when they interact with brands. Satisfy their hunger for meaningful engagement by using WhatsApp chatbots to serve up blog posts, eBooks, infographics, and other shareable ideas that expand your brand footprint.
Convert leads into customers by offering exclusive deals and discounts. WhatsApp lets you create subscription channels that people can use to follow your brand, but why not take it a step further? By providing perks that are only available through the chatbot, you'll encourage sustained engagement and help your conversations make the transition from mere back-and-forth exchanges to effective funnels that bolster customer satisfaction.
Start Redefining Customer Engagement With a WhatsApp Chatbot
WhatsApp chatbots are a valuable way to establish a stronger rapport with consumers. The only problem is that there's no universal path to success. Like other business endeavors, you'll need to experiment with different outreach techniques and leverage other tools to get the most out of your WhatsApp bots.
A lot is riding on your ability to hold a healthy conversation – and the discussion should ideally start before you ever make contact with a real customer.
Talk to the Ozonetel team about building your WhatsApp outreach around a platform that handles the fine-grained details (like training the AI, managing multiple marketing channels, and integrating with other APIs). Countless enterprises depend on our cloud integrations to wrangle their bots while they focus on the strategic planning – why not join the ranks by trying a demo?
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Posted Jan 16, 2024
I researched and created a blog explaining the typical WhatsApp chatbot workflow and promoting the client's service as a superior alternative.
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