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If your business is growing and you use WhatsApp to communicate with your customers, you should use the WhatsApp Business API or WhatsApp Cloud API. With the APIs, you can do many things like running marketing campaigns, automating your communications, and more.
Speaking of automation, one of the most effective ways to automate many communications is by using a WhatsApp chatbot. In Everything You Need to Know About WhatsApp Chatbots, we discuss it in more detail.
You can create a chatbot by coding or using a chatbot builder.
Either way, you can program your bot to handle repetitive tasks or communications that don’t necessarily require a human. With bots, you free up more time for your staff so they can focus on tasks needing human interaction. Many things, like sales, customer support, and marketing, can be done by bots while your team rests. In short, with bots, you accomplish more by doing less. Here are some use cases for a WhatsApp chatbot:
- Automate simple, repetitive conversations. A chatbot can handle basic questions and requests, like “What are your hours?” or “I’d like to schedule an appointment.”
- Offer 24/7 customer service. Chatbots can assist customers any time of day or night and during weekends and holidays when your business is closed.
- Qualify leads. Chatbots can start a conversation with website visitors and determine if they’re potential customers before passing them to a sales agent.
- Provide order updates. Chatbots can automatically notify customers about the status of their orders and shipments.
- Share information. Chatbots are useful for sharing basic details like store locations, contact info, product details, and answers to frequently asked questions.
- Collect customer feedback. Chatbots can survey customers about their experience and satisfaction with your business. The feedback helps you improve your products, services, and customer support.
We’ll cover some of these use cases in detail.
24/7 customer service
A WhatsApp chatbot works 24/7. No matter when your customers message you, they can get many questions answered.
This is especially useful if you have customers across time zones. Instead of hiring overseas customer support, a bot can handle much of the workload.
See A simple strategy for creating a user-friendly WhatsApp chatbot to learn more about designing a WhatsApp chatbot. Fear not! You don’t need to know a lot about bots to design a good one ;)
Lead qualification
For certain kinds of services, a business needs to gather a lot of information from their leads to see if they have their ideal customer profile. If they do, they can offer their service, otherwise they reject the leads. Qualifying leads is a repetitive process and all of them must go through it. A WhatsApp chatbot could take care of it. Let’s say that you have a real estate agency and match tenants or home buyers with homeowners. When people message you, you need to create a profile of them to see whether they are a good match for your listings. Your bot could ask them questions about
- Whether they want an apartment, house, or villa
- Whether they want to rent or buy
- How many bedrooms they need
- Which area of the city they’re interested in,
And many other things.
You can design a bot that asks these qualifying questions with reply buttons. Leads can easily select a reply with a tap, and within a few seconds, a profile is created for them. If there are matching listings for them, it can assign an agent to them and if there aren’t any, it can tell them that.
Lead generation via Instagram and Facebook ads
Many businesses, such as ecommerce, travel, and education companies, advertise their products and services on Instagram and Facebook. They can add a button to the ad that, once clicked, opens the customer’s WhatsApp Messenger app so they can chat with the business.
Customers can ask questions about product details, pricing, how to buy or book a product or service, and more. Businesses have standard procedures for handling many of these common questions or repetitive tasks. As a result, chatbots can handle many of them.
Here’s an example of a hotel using a WhatsApp chatbot to help customers book rooms:
The hotel puts ads on Instagram or Facebook. If someone clicks an ad, their WhatsApp app opens. They ask a question, and the WhatsApp chatbot helps them book a room.
The good news is that WhatsApp doesn’t charge you for the first user-initiated conversation from Facebook and Instagram ads. Since a bot replies to the customers instantly, there’s a high chance that a sale can be closed right then and there.
Automate sales
Leads or current customers may message you on WhatsApp to ask about certain products. Your WhatsApp chatbot can show them the products using single-product or multi-product messages. Customers can then choose what they want, add items to a shopping cart, and purchase through WhatsApp. For example, you might own a grocery store. A customer messages you asking if you have sourdough. Your bot shows them sourdough using a single-product message. They select the sourdough, add it to their cart, and complete the purchase.
Every time you bring new or run out of products, you can update your product inventory and create new single-product or multi-product messages for your chatbot.
Recover an abandoned cart in your eCommerce store
One of the biggest pains of any eCommerce business owner is abandoned carts. Why would a customer select a product and arrive at the final step of purchasing it only to leave it? There are many reasons for this. The cost of your shipping or other fees could be high, and customers only see that at the final step. That’s why they leave. However, an abandoned cart does not have to stay abandoned forever ;)
Your bot can send them an incentivizing message, for example, a discount, with call-to-action buttons that takes them to their checkout page. From there they can finish their shopping.
If the customer doesn’t claim the discount, the bot could send them a reminder after a certain period of time.
Run marketing campaigns that end with sales
If you have a new product that you want to announce to your customers or if you’re running a sales campaign, you can automate your WhatsApp chatbot to do it for you. It could reply to customers if they inquire about further information, connect them with a sales agent or help them step by step to make a purchase.
Automate repetitive notifications
So far, we mostly told you about the benefits of bots in generating sales. What if you wanted to automate tasks that are not about generating sales but are transactional? Here is a list of some of them:
- Order placement confirmation
- Order cancellation confirmation
- Shipping update notifications
- Appointment confirmation
- Appointment reminder
- Payment confirmation
- Payment reminder
- FAQ
You can design your bot so that once an order is placed, an appointment is booked, or a payment is made, an automatic confirmation message gets sent to the customer. The bot can also send reminders before an appointment or for a payment that’s due.
Collect feedback and reviews
One of the most effective ways to improve your business is to gather customer feedback. A couple of days after a product/service is delivered to a customer, your bot can ask them for feedback.
Depending on the customer’s answer, the bot could do different things. For example, if the customer is very happy with their order, the bot could ask them to write a review on your website. If they’re not happy with it, it could ask more questions about what they liked or didn’t like about it so that you can improve your business and products.
Final thoughts
If you use WhatsApp to talk to your customers and your business is growing, a WhatsApp chatbot could be very helpful for you. With a bot, you can automate all of the communications that don’t require a human agent so that your staff has more time to focus on the work that does necessitate human involvement. With a carefully designed bot, you can help customers self-serve, notify them when necessary, such as when their payment is confirmed, and increase your sales.
Learn more
If you’d like to learn more about how WhatsApp can help you grow your business, please reach out to us on WhatsApp at +13024070488.
We also offer a free consultation session where we go through your use case, answer any questions about WhatsApp, and help you build a strategy to make the best out of the platform. Book a call with us below. We’d love to speak with you.
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Further reading
All About Interactive WhatsApp Message Templates
A Simple Strategy for Creating a User-friendly WhatsApp Chatbot
