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WhatsApp Bot For Customer Service

Akanksha

18 April 2024

Whatsapp finally launched Whatsapp Business API in 2018 initially in beta mode and has already started changing the experience perception of the brands that got the early advantage to test it. In India, businesses like – Book My Show, RedBus, Goibibo (Now merged with Makemytrip), Swiggy, Xiaomi etc. are amongst the first companies to get the Business API from Whatsapp to test its usability in their respective industries. Now it is being widely used by business in their pursuit of delivering better customer experience.
We will talk more about the benefit brands derive from adopting Whatsapp chatbot as a channel to interact with their customers and by Omnichannel Contact Center Solution. But let us first take a deeper look at what Whatsapp offers to different business sizes.

Whatsapp Business App

This is a product for small businesses or single owner run businesses. Business owners can download the app for free from Google Play store or Appstore and use both the business and the personal app using the same number. They will need to transfer business contacts to the business app manually. They also get a broadcast message option to reach out to customers who have interacted with them before.

Whatsapp Business App gives small business owners features like business profile to display important business information like a brief of what they do, opening and closing time, apart from common information like address and contact information. They also get Quick Replies feature to answer the common queries they receive using canned messages. The Whatsapp Business App has made tracking and follow ups easy for small business owners by providing them analytics on the broadcast messages apart from the blue ticks. Business owners can check their delivery report and open rate to have a clear picture of engagement level of their customers.

Whatsapp Business API

The Whatsapp Business API is a product for large enterprises. It helps companies serve on a platform where most of their customers are. With the API, companies can send out template message (notifications) to share information like booked ticket, service status, invoice copy etc. The Whatsapp Business API easily integrates with  CRM to send out template message to subscribed customers. 

The Whatsapp Business API opens up Whatsapp as a platform for integrations with customer experience management tools like Chat, Bot and CRM. The Whatsapp Business API however comes with some terms. 

  1. Business can send out conversational messages (two way messages) to customers only when they opt in. While sending out conversational messages is free of cost, companies will have to respond within 24 hours after the message is received.

  2. However, if the business does not respond to a customer within 24 hours, they cannot deliver the message after 24 hours timeout.

  3. However, for every missed message, they can send out template messages if it is properly configured with the CRM. The cost per template message will vary from 0.5 cents to 9 cents. You may read more about Whatsapp Business API and Business App here.

The Whatsapp Bot

Whatsapp Business API can be seamlessly integrated with Call Center Soluion tools. C-Zentrix has already integrated Whatsapp with its Chat, Bot and Helpdesk tools, to provide you an all integrated Whatsapp Bot.

The Whatsapp Bot can be trained with regular sales and support queries. The bot can answer responses completely in a conversational approach. Though some business prefer to use Type 1 for this and Type 2 for that in a typical IVR fashion, we recommend the bot to be truly conversational as a live agent would be communicating. With our conversational AI engine, the Whatsapp bot provides a superior level of engagement. It can serve multimedia files as well as geo location.

Needless to say, the Whatsapp Bot provides a round the clock support for all the requests sent out by customers. Also with live chat integrated with Whatsapp API, live agents can respond to the queries, while the customer is on Whatsapp.

It is highly recommended to reach out to customers on a platform they are spending most of their social time on. According to a recent article in Forbes, the global time spent on Whatsapp in three months was 85 billion hours. (Source: Forbes website

Whatsapp Business API gives largely a free to use platform for conversational messages. It becomes a far better alternative than the age old SMS. This ensures that your business drives exceptional channel ROI using Whatsapp Bot. The integrations with Chat or Bot also leads to no additional infrastructure cost.

Apart from the extensive analytics that comes with a chat or bot integration, Whatsapp also provides quick insights into the delivery of messages and engagement of users.

 

The best benefit Whatsapp Business API brings to brands and their customers is unparallel convenience. I have used the Whatsapp movie tickets sent by Bookmyshow on several occasions and can vouch that using Whatsapp was far more convenient than finding the ticket on my mail or downloading the Bookmyshow app.

The usage of Whatsapp is growing and in many countries like India, South Africa, UAE, Latin American countries  it has become the dominant channel for interaction both for text chat and video chat. So providing Whatsapp chatbot makes a significant benefit to end users to interact with business. 

On the business front, using Whatsapp API opens several doors as discussed above. Businesses can integrate chat, bot, CRM to their Whatsapp business account and get added benefits like routing Whatsapp queries to different agents that allows them to handle multiple conversations at once. Providing 24x7 availability is a great feature along with automating responses that comes with integrating a bot. Our CZ Bot is an advanced NLP based conversational bot that can easily fend routine customer queries and can transfer the conversation to an agent for interactions it cannot handle. Both the CZ Chat and CZ Bot when integrated with a CRM, can create a ticket in the CRM whenever an incident is reported. 

The CRM integration with Whatsapp is a boon for businesses. Normally when a Whatsapp query comes, businesses have no way to identify the customer. With the CRM integration businesses not only can identify a repeat customer but also get all their details and interaction history and categorise them as priority/premium customers or regulars and support them accordingly. 

Building Whatsapp Bot

Step 1: The prerequisite to build Whatsapp bot is to have a Whatsapp Business API. Incase you already have one, that is great. However if you need to have a Whatsapp API, we can also provide you the same.

Step 2: The second piece is to create the bot. To construct the bot, the conversational flow has to be organised. Using CZ Bot studio, the user utterances (what the end user will type) need to be entered. The intent and repsonse related to the utternace need to be entered as well. Incase for some responses (3rd party) API need to be called. Within the CZ Bot studio, the storyline is created which creates the conversational flow. The bot is then trained and ready for deployment.

Step 3: The third part is to integrate with Whatsapp API docker system. Once the integration is done, the end user can send the Opt in request and then start interacting with the Whatsapp Bot. Isn't that pretty simple!

Customer Service Solutions

Conclusion

Although Whatsapp has found its application in almost every industry, but industries like E-Commerce, Banking & Insurance, and Travel & Tourism have extensive business cases for the use and application of Whatsapp for customer service or experience delivery.

For more on business cases from E-Commerce, Banking & Insurance, and Travel & Holidays contact us by following this link. If you wish to pitch the idea of incorporating Whatsapp chatbot as a platform for customer service delivery in your organisation, we can help you develop business cases specific to your industry. Just reach out to us on contact@c-zentrix.com.

 

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