WhatsApp has taken gigantic strides in the past few years, ascending to becoming the world’s most popular messaging app and now gradually making its mark as the preferred platform for brand-customer communication. The 2 billion+ user base makes it a predominant choice for brands looking to add conversational commerce to their offerings.

With the WhatsApp Business Platform, brands can use chatbots and automation to acquire leads, promote their products and offer a 24/7 always-online customer support channel.

In an age where customer experience is at a premium, brands that offer a fantastic customer experience bring in 5.7x more revenue than their competitors who do not offer a good customer experience.
(Source: Forrester)

With that in mind, let us look at some ways in which WhatsApp enables brands to upgrade their customer service experience.

Making commercial communication more conversational with WhatsApp 

In a time without chatbots, users would have to navigate cumbersome menus and sections on brand websites to find the product they were looking for. If the website isn’t extremely well-designed, this whole experience would take a lot of clicks and several minutes of the user’s time.

With WhatsApp chatbots, you can bypass this hassle and simulate the experience of walking into a store and having the sales rep walk you through the entire perusal and purchasing process.

For example, if a customer wants to find a nearby physical store that stocks an item they saw online the conversation could go something like.

Brands can also use WhatsApp’s CTA buttons to easily send payment links to customers at the appropriate moment. For example, a restaurant could send a quick payment link to a customer over WhatsApp following a quick conversation where the customer mentioned their order details and address.

With WhatsApp’s end to end encryption, brands can safely share documents like invoices and receipts within the chat window to make it easily accessible to their customers.

WhatsApp provides contextual data that brands can use for bespoke customer experiences

Online experiences over platforms like WhatsApp are not just limited to replicating the app or website that a brand has, instead, you can also use the unique conversational capabilities of WhatsApp and the context of the conversation to create intuitive, highly personalized and satisfying customer experiences.

With natural-language processing automation solutions like those provided by Karix, you can delve deeper into the mindset of a buyer to give them the right information at the right time in their journey. For example, you can naturally recommend a pair of shoes from your catalog in a chat window after a conversation has been initiated around similar or complementary products, making your interaction more data driven and contextual.

WhatsApp can integrate seamlessly with a CRM, allowing you to utilize past consumer data to foster long-lasting customer loyalty with a 24/7, always-on, personalized customer support system.

WhatsApp chatbots make it easy for brands to re-engage dormant customers and abandoned carts

WhatsApp is much more effective at re-engaging customers than the traditional methods such as email or SMS because of its contextual and conversational flow. This allows brands to re-engage with dormant users and those who have abandoned a purchase midway with the right nudges like a coupon code or a discount to incentivize the purchase.

WhatsApp chatbots allow brands to offer robust post-sales support

Post-sales support is one of the pillars of a great customer experience. With WhatsApp chatbots, you can have an always-on, 24/7 support presence that your customer can take advantage of at a moment’s notice.

With a combination of automation and human agents for solving more complex queries, you can drastically reduce the time it takes to resolve support queries. AI-powered WhatsApp support solutions are incredibly cost-efficient and can be scaled easily to adapt to incoming demand.

Two of the most common user support queries – tracking orders and refunds – can be seamlessly enabled over WhatsApp, dramatically improving the user experience.

WhatsApp is also a comfortable place for brands to collect user feedback, given that people are already used to sending text messages back and forth on the platform.

WhatsApp Chatbot use cases

Let us take a look at a few different ways in which WhatsApp chatbots can be deployed, depending on the industry you service.

Retail – Exploration + Lead Capture

One of the most common ways to use a WhatsApp chatbot if you are a retail brand is to use it to highlight your product catalog while simultaneously leading the user through your defined journey and collecting lead data based on their responses at each step of the way.

For example:

Banking – Faster Query Resolution + Online Banking

In the financial and banking sector, brands can use the powerful capabilities of the WhatsApp Business Platform to create a fantastic customer experience that is built on robust customer support.

As we have discussed, the scalability of WhatsApp chatbots and the ability to integrate with intelligent third-party solution providers like Karix makes it possible for brands like AU BANK to simplify banking for their customers.

For AU Bank, Karix’s WhatsApp solution powered by our advanced conversational platform allowed customers to initiate service requests and open a savings account, all through a chat conversation.

Travel – Booking Details + Schedule Changes 

WhatsApp chatbots are incredibly useful for travel brands. For a sector that relies a lot on competitive pricing and timely notifications, chatbots allow brands to send customers all the important information right to their phone.

This means that invoices, booking confirmations, delays or flight cancelation notifications, discounts and loyalty rewards can be sent straight to a customer’s phone using WhatsApp’s secure end-to-end encryption.

In addition, travel brands can use WhatsApp chatbots to assist prospective flyers and existing customers with a 24/7 always-on support channel for any queries or assistance they might need.

WhatsApp chatbots are incredibly versatile and hold great potential for upgrading your existing customer experience. If you would like to learn more about chatbots, make sure you bookmark the Karix blog and revisit often!