AHJ George
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.
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.
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?
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:
Many of the most impactful chatbot use cases are highly industry-specific. For instance:
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:
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:
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]
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.
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.
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:
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:
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?