WhatsApp Business API has a lot of advanced features that help businesses of all sizes communicate with their customers easily. At a glance
1.Connects with Customers on their Preferred Channel
Successful brands know the importance of how important it is to be available to customers wherever they need it. A survey by Neilson shows that 56% of customers want to connect with brands over chat rather than call for customer support.
“For example, MakeMyTrip started using WhatsApp Business API to reduce the number of calls their customer care executives generally need to handle for issues like refunds and ticket issues. By doing this, they have seen a 15% reduction in refund-related calls to their customer agents,” (Deep Karla) Spokesperson said. ( Source 1)
SnapTravel (which allows its customers to find and book hotel rooms on various messaging platforms) is also one of such brands which started using WhatsApp business API to handle customer-related queries on their most preferred channel and has seen good results apart from other messaging platforms.
2. Enables Real-Time Conversations
Customers want to reach and connect with brands just like their friends and family members, where they get instant responses. Real-time conversations are most preferred by the customer, not the traditional way of sending messages and waiting for a reply for days and hours. The communication should be two-way and instant. WhatsApp holds the features that help resolve this issue by delivering high-quality, reliable two-way communication across the globe.
For example, Shopclues, an e-commerce platform, wants to improve its relationship with customers to drive a better post-sales experience and improve opportunities for cross or upsells.
The brands using SMS to confirm orders, check status, and look for product recommendations have noticed suboptimal customer engagement that results in lower customer value. Shopclues deployed WhatsApp Business API in July 2018 and saw an increase in the number of new orders received per message. Also, the company achieved a 23% increase in tracking page visits over four weeks, a 28% increase in cross-sells over four weeks, and a 57% increase in new orders per message sent over four weeks.
3. Improve Your Business’ Reach
WhatsApp has billions of active users monthly, using 38 minutes daily on average.
It also holds a 98% open rate and 48-60% CTR for messages sent.
With this, it’s considered the best place to send broadcasts to hundreds and thousands of users.
BookMyShow co-founder and director Parikshit Dar said,” with their reach expanding in India. As a global communication platform, WhatsApp helps them expand its reach over millions of existing and new customers, improving the border reach over millions of existing and new customers, thus improving customer experience at BookMyShow for transactional communication.”
“Close to 95% of our customers use smartphones to book tickets on the platform. Where WhatsApp is widespread. An in-house survey shows that the majority (98%) of users prefer communication over WhatsApp compared to SMS or email, he said.
4. Connect with Customers Across the Globe
WhatsApp holds its reach in 190+ countries across the globe, with 2.2 billion active users on the platform.
It’s the most common messaging platform across countries like Brazil, India, USA, Saudi Arabia, and more.
That makes WhatsApp a widely accessible marketing platform to offer products and services on an international level. Irrespective of where you operate, you can easily target a broader global audience by connecting with them on Whatsapp.
“WhatsApp assists us additionally to improve the customer experience for transaction communication further, not only in India but also worldwide, in succession when BookMyShow is growing its reach through worldwide markets such as in the Middle East, South East Asia amongst others. Thus WhatsApp became a unified channel of communication to our customers globally.” BookMyShow co-founder and director Parikshit Dar added.
5. Send Personalised Communication to Customers
With its advanced features, WhatsApp provides many options for brands to personalise their conversation with their customers.
WhatsApp is the best platform to personalise customer experiences. With emojis and various options to send messages like images, videos, documents, audio, clickable buttons, and more. Using these options, brands can easily create a personalised customer experience.
71% of customers feel unsatisfied or distracted if their shopping experience is impersonal. (Source 2)
6. Connect your CRMs & Software to Send Automated Notifications
Whenever a user takes any actions, automated notifications get triggered. For, e.g., make payment, purchase a product, add a product to a cart, etc.
Instead of sending notifications to customers via SMS or Email, you will get more open rates and conversions if you use WhatsApp.
On average, you can recover your abandoned cart rate up to 25-60% by using Whatsapp notification.
It is possible by connecting your CRM, payment portals, and e-commerce platforms like Hubspot, Zapier, Shopify, and WooCommerce via APIs to automate all such notifications on WhatsApp.
7. Right Platform for 2-Way communication
Unlike SMS or emails, WhatsApp helps customers to connect directly with brands. Customers have so many queries before selecting any product for purchase. WhatsApp allows two-way communication between brands and users, enabling them to get answers in real-time instantly.
Using our SmatBot platform, you can easily assign customer chats to agents and handle queries in a single platform.
8. Recommending Products With Smart Buttons
Unlike other apps, WhatsApp Business API provides the most relevant product instead of recommending similar products to the customer based on their search, purchase, or chat history.
Moreover, the WhatsApp template message feature provides smart touch buttons to select the option of their choice. Instead of typing, customers can touch the button. For example, controls like ‘Add to cart or ‘View more’ can redirect the customer to the app/site and trigger a reaction.
9. Answering FAQs
In most businesses where customer care executives encounter the same set of common questions a number of times in a single day. Answering those questions by agents wastes their time and results in pending tasks.
WhatsApp Business API can help businesses to preprogram a set of FAQs, and whenever customers ask such questions, WhatsApp chatbots automatically answer the customers without the intervention of humans. And relieves humans from working on more complex tasks.
The chatbot finds a set of predefined keywords and shows the most relevant answers to the customer queries. Even it transfers the call or chat to the human agents when it finds a complex question from the customers.
10. Providing Post-Sales Support
Business customer service doesn’t end with product purchases. Businesses must even take care of their customer after the delivery of the product. Because in some cases, the customer finds issues with the product, and they may want to exchange the product, ask for a refund, have problems with delivery, shipping, and many more.
WhatsApp Business API helps the customer interact easily on chat instead of SMS or emailing the business, which takes time to get a response. Whereas in WhatsApp, both customers and brands actively respond to queries.
11. Build a Strong Brand Identity
Most people purchase from brands they trust.
WhatsApp Business API helps the brands to establish that trust by creating a strong brand identity with the WhatsApp Green Tick.
The Green Tick Verification is a confirmation from Whatsapp about brand reliability and building customer trust.
With it, your contact will appear with the name instead of the phone number of users who have not added you to their contact.
Revolutionise Your Communication With Customers Using Whatsapp Business API.
WhatsApp Business API holds the potential to provide all new experiences to your users to communicate better with brands. Especially for those who want to reach a global audience and expand their reach.
The capabilities mentioned above of WhatsApp business API are some of the most prominent ones. Still, it has so many others that helps brands in building customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.
Omnichannel engagement provides a lot of promise for businesses to connect all channels into one customer experience flow seamlessly. And WhatsApp provides great options to boost customer engagement and redefine support.
With private and encrypted messaging, WhatsApp will add great value to your customer service technique and give you a competitive edge in the industry. You can thus make it a segment of your customer service mix and put your business on the right track to growth.
If you want to get started with the WhatsApp business API for your business, SmatBot can help you with the simplest process.
We even provide a 14-day free trial service and guide businesses in all possible ways to succeed with WhatsApp business API based on your business needs.
Ready to communicate better with your customers in a whole new way? We can help you.
Want to Get Started with WhatsApp Business API?
Steps to Follow:
- To start and leverage WhatsApp business API, you must first set up a WhatsApp business account.
If you have an existing WhatsApp business account, you can easily migrate from WhatsApp Business to WhatsApp Business API
- Next, you must verify your WhatsApp business account by submitting the necessary documents with your registered business service provider or WhatsApp official partner.
- After a successful verification, access is provided to implement a verified WhatsApp chat or template.
- Finally, after completing the above steps, you will get access to start using the WhatsApp business API.