WhatsApp chatbots are increasingly accepted by customers – they’re available, quick to respond and fast to resolve matters. In fact, several studies have found that customers are often happy to deal with chatbots instead of live agents.
What’s more, in the right environment, chatbots can go a long way to building and growing your business: driving sales and generating brand loyalty.
WhatsApp is one of the best places for chatbot activity – for customers, WhatsApp is a trusted and very personal channel that’s conveniently available on the device they’re likely to be using all day long: their phone.
In this article, we outline how WhatsApp chatbots can keep your customers happy and directly drive sales. What’s more, WhatsApp bots also boost brand loyalty while saving costs too.
Let’s take a look.
What is a WhatsApp chatbot?
Most of us are already familiar with website chatbots – those convenient helpers that assist us with essential customer service questions right on a company’s website. Using a mix of pre-programmed routines and AI, website chatbots deal with typical queries quickly and efficiently.
WhatsApp bots are similar in nature but instead of hiding away on a website, a WhatsApp chatbot sits right on the device we all love – our mobile phone. This brings several advantages: WhatsApp chatbots are more personal, more accessible and more present.
This proximity to your customer brings a whole range of benefits – some common to chatbot use in the broad, some specific to WhatsApp chatbots.
How WhatsApp chatbot can benefit your business
The benefits of using WhatsApp chatbots are broad and deep, so we’ll divide these into four broad categories: direct sales growth, brand building, cost reductions, and customer satisfaction.
Grow revenue
A chatbot on your client’s mobile device is a great way to boost your sales revenue and there are plenty of strategies you can take to help you make the most of your WhatsApp chatbot.
1. WhatsApp for sales incentives
You can offer customers the option to buy throughout WhatsApp chats – whether they’re resolving a product query, answering a quiz or looking for some product information.
WhatsApp sales incentives could include a special discount that depends on a quick buy, or perhaps the opportunity to get some free goodies if your customer answers a quiz fully.
It could also include regular promotions sent straight to a customer’s WhatsApp, automated and closely targeted using your chatbot platform.
It’s a low-cost, effective way to reach customers on their device and you can fully track your promotions, just as you can do with email or online advertising.
2. Recover abandoned carts
It’s frustrating for businesses, but customers frequently drop off when shopping – abandoning a carefully picked shopping cart because they were distracted, couldn’t complete payment or for anyone of a host of other reasons.
With WhatsApp chatbots you can give your customers an easy way to resume their cart, keeping the items they need or even topping it up. Just send a quick WhatsApp message once it’s clear a shopping cart is abandoned.
The immediacy of WhatsApp provides an excellent opportunity to ensure customers successfully complete a shopping task.
3. Offers across the product lifecycle
Many products warrant additional purchases over time, whether it’s an upgrade or an important accessory. You already have the data on what your customer purchased, why not harness this data to prompt your customers to continue shopping based on a product they already purchased?
Yes, you can launch offers through the product lifecycle by sending cleverly timed emails, but with email so easily ignored, you’re much better off using WhatsApp to exploit the lifecycle of a product.
It works for consumable products too – just ping your customer on WhatsApp to ask them if they need a top-up, all utilizing affordable and scalable automated chatbot technology.
4. Acquire new customers
WhatsApp is great for picking up new customers too.
Instead of directing prospects to your website or Facebook page, consider sending them straight to your WhatsApp chatbot. It gives you the opportunity to use interactive, cleverly timed WhatsApp conversations to build awareness with your customers.
In many ways, WhatsApp is a very personal method of engaging with prospective customers, certainly far more personal than Google Ads or relentless inboxing.
Your highly intelligent chatbot can interact with prospective customers, starting a conversation based on browsing history – all in the convenient location of your user’s handset.
Brand building
Clever marketers will know how growing a business is not just about a hard focus on new sales. Strong brands attract customers and brand loyalty retains customers.
The personal nature of WhatsApp chatbots makes these a great fit for brand building exercises.
5. Introduce your brand
So, when connecting with your customer on WhatsApp, remember: it’s not always about trying to make a hard and fast sale. Instead, use the conversational abilities of your WhatsApp chatbot to build a relationship with a potential customer.
Think of it as a different way to do content marketing – instead of publishing long blog pieces, use interactive chat to give away useful bits like recipes or travel advice, or to publish a fun quiz.
In essence, WhatsApp is a great way to drip-feed information about your brand.
6. Foster brand culture
You’ll know who your loyal customers are. WhatsApp can help you build very deep relationships with existing customers, encouraging ongoing sales and loyalty to your brand.
How? Your WhatsApp chatbot taps into the deep knowledge of your customers that already reside on your business systems to automatically initiate conversations are highly personalized: whether it’s offering a pertinent and timely tip or a complementary product offer.
7. Give loyalty programs a lift
Customers love loyalty programs – who doesn’t like getting free stuff, right? But there is one issue with loyalty programs: membership can quickly collect dust and be swiftly forgotten.
WhatsApp interactions are a great way to brush away the cobwebs.
For example, your WhatsApp chatbot can immediately notify a customer when they’ve earned loyalty points, or when their points are enough for a reward. Or, use your clever chatbot’s gamification capabilities to drum up interest in your loyalty program.
8. Utilize user-generated content
If you’re a user of WhatsApp you’ll know how easy it is to share content with other WhatsApp users.
Marketers will also know how powerful user-generated content can be. Why not use your WhatsApp chatbot to encourage user-generated content that you can use to build your brand?
Your chatty WhatsApp bot can encourage your customers to take a snap or upload a video that involves your product – or your experience. Next, review the content and share it with your other customers.
It’s a fantastic way to build your brand.
Save money
Chatbots are universally terrific at driving efficiency and cost savings. That goes for WhatsApp chatbots too, but in the case of WhatsApp, you can rely on even greater chatbot engagement delivering even bigger savings.
9. Reduce support costs
Dealing with routine queries such as “where is my shipment” or “why is an item missing” can easily soak up a significant chunk of time in the contact center. These questions are repetitive and predictable – and the answers often lie in existing business data.
Chatbots can automatically answer many of these questions and at an extremely low cost. It’s simple really: chatbots can be multiplied infinitely, so you can run countless concurrent chatbot sessions – and there’s no need to pay chatbots by the hour.
The cost savings are significant.
10. Increase employee productivity
Chances are you have many highly experienced support agents who are often caught up trying to answer really simple queries.
The result: customers with complex queries that need an experienced agent end up waiting in long queues before they get the help they need.
Your WhatsApp chatbot can help make your support staff more productive by taking care of the more routine queries.
Result: less expenditure on staffing, a boost in employee morale and less waiting time for customers.
Happier customers
Chatbots and WhatsApp chatbots, in particular, are also an excellent way to drive customer happiness. Personal, immediate and convenient: all qualities of WhatsApp chatbots, and popular customer service qualities too.
11. Notifications where they matter
Need to reach out to a customer via email? Good luck with that. In contrast, a WhatsApp notification is far more direct, and far more likely to get seen by your customer. Why? Because WhatsApp notifications are displayed in a place that matters a lot – your customer’s mobile device.
In practice, this means that it’s less likely that a customer will miss an important notification – it’s easy for a “delayed order” notification to get binned in junk mail.
In contrast, your WhatsApp notification will stick until dismissed, so customers won’t sit up waiting for an order that won’t arrive.
12. Customer service 24/7
Particularly for smaller businesses, running a 24/7 customer support operation can be prohibitively expensive, while extended support hours will be costly too.
Chatbots can’t deal with all customer service requests, but your WhatsApp chatbot can easily extend your customer support hours.
Chatbots don’t need sleep so you can use your WhatsApp chatbot to serve customer care requirements on a host of typical issues such as new orders, questions about shipment or basic product support.
It’s a great opportunity to improve your customer experience, at a low cost.
13. WhatsApp live agents
Don’t forget, using WhatsApp chatbots does not mean that automated conversations are the beginning and the end of your customer’s WhatsApp interaction. In fact, you can hand over a WhatsApp chatbot conversation to a life support agent.
It’s an important distinction because it gives your customers incredibly easy access to qualified live agents who can take care of even the most complex of issues – right on the customer’s mobile device.
14. Collect feedback and reviews
Understanding what your customers think is key to delivering improved products and services, and to stop growing problems from spiraling out of control.
However, collecting this feedback is tough – customers can be reluctant to fill out website forms.
The immediacy of WhatsApp makes it far easier to collect feedback.
A friendly chatbot can pose a few cheeky questions that encourage high response rates, reducing the effort to give feedback to the absolute minimum. Minimum effort means maximum feedback.
Why Xenioo delivers a top WhatsApp chatbot experience
Chatbot’s success is highly dependent on the software you’re using. It’s about the features and capabilities available to you and, of course, how well these features are implemented.
Xenioo’s chatbot platform reaches across chat channels – from your website, through to Amazon Alexa and of course WhatsApp. We think Xenioo does a top job on WhatsApp, thanks to our outstanding features including:
- Conversation handover. Every good chatbot knows there’s a time to hand over chats to a live operator. Xenioo makes this as seamless as possible so your human operators can easily dive straight into a WhatsApp exchange on your customer’s mobile phone.
- Support and supervision. Keeping customer service top-notch around the clock can be tough, but Xenioo’s built-in team supervision features solve this tricky issue. Xenioo makes it incredibly easy to ensure consistently good chatbot support day in, day out.
- AI technology. Chatbots work better when they can understand natural language. Xenioo chatbots harness artificial intelligence technology including natural language processing (NLP) to interpret typed inputs, delivering a far better chatbot experience compared to rigid menus and structures.
- Broadcast features. Reach a targeted audience right on their phone thanks to Xenioo’s Broadcast Behaviour. Send the latest news and offers straight into your customer’s WhatsApp client and comprehensively track the response metrics on your Xenioo console.
So, with Xenioo, your business can enjoy all the benefits of a WhatsApp chatbot. What’s more, you can publish your WhatsApp chatbot across to a range of other platforms too, with minimal adjustment.
It’s easy to get started with Xenioo – try out Xenioo for free, check out our tutorials or read up on what’s possible with Xenioo.
Want to know more? Just get in touch.