Your customers are on WhatsApp and you know how important it is to engage with them effectively on the platform. You may have hired a sales or customer support team to take care of the inbound chats, but scaling that can be very costly. In addition, repeatedly responding to the same common and frequently asked queries can be monotonous and mind-numbing for your support team not to mention that this time can be used to answer queries that actually matter instead of spending it in such an unproductive manner.
That’s where WhatsApp chatbots can be a saviour!
WhatsApp chatbots can not only help you improve your customer interactions but also increase speed and engagement without human intervention. Let’s start by first understanding what a WhatsApp chatbot is.
It is important to note that in order to employ WhatsApp chatbots you need to have access to the official WhatsApp Business API.
Table of Contents
What is WhatsApp Chatbot?
A Whatsapp chatbot is an automated tool or system that allows you to receive customer queries or actions on WhatsApp and automatically respond to them or perform some custom predefined action. Chatbots do not require human intervention and can work round the clock, providing 24/7 automated customer interactions.
WhatsApp chatbots can also integrate with AI systems to provide a full-fledged automated chat flow. These chatbots require WhatsApp API to work and can not be set up using your standard WhatsApp or WhatsApp Business mobile apps.
Why Build a WhatsApp Chatbot?
There are many benefits of building a WhatsApp chatbot. Some of them include:
- Enhanced Customer Service: A WhatsApp chatbot ensures your customers receive immediate assistance any time of the day, streamlining support and enhancing user satisfaction.
- Increased Sales and Engagement: Chatbots facilitate a smoother buying journey and personalized engagement, helping boost conversions and customer loyalty. If you run an eCommerce store, this means there’s a smooth flow for your customers to buy your products and services.
- Operational Efficiency: By automating routine tasks and responses, chatbots free up your team to focus on more strategic initiatives, optimizing resource allocation.
- Global Reach and Accessibility: With WhatsApp’s widespread adoption, chatbots enable you to connect with a global audience, providing support across different time zones without pause, ensuring your business is accessible 24/7.
- Cost Reduction: Implementing a chatbot can significantly reduce operational costs by minimizing the need for a large customer service or sales team, especially during off-hours or for handling common inquiries.
These are just a few of the myriad benefits of building a WhatsApp chatbot. Now that we know the benefits of building a chatbot, let’s look at the how WhatsApp chatbots can be useful irrespective of which industry you’re doing business in.
WhatsApp Chatbot Use Cases
The possibilities that a WhatsApp chatbot offers are endless. Still wondering how adding a WhatsApp chatbot to your arsenal can help boost your business? Well in that case let us take a look at certain scenarios in which WhatsApp chatbots can prove to be extremely beneficial.
Healthcare
Let us take a look at how WhatsApp chatbots can greatly improve the customer experience of healthcare institutions such as hospitals and clinics.
Hospitals and private practices can enable their patients to schedule appointments through WhatsApp chatbots. This process makes it easier for patients to book appointments and ensures the entire process of appointment booking is smooth and effective.
Another situation in which WhatsApp chatbots can come in handy is consultation reminders. Apart from this WhatsApp chatbots can be used to send relevant and informational healthcare advice and even send patients medication reminders. These ensure that your patients are on track and help them to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
WhatsApp chatbots can also be programmed to answer common and frequently asked queries whether related to health, medications, insurance and even hospital policies. This helps save a lot of time and money thereby reducing the need for a person to actively respond to these messages.
When designing a chatbot meant to interact with patients it would be better to incorporate a chat flow that is empathetic, considerate, caring and makes the patients feel valued and heard.
E-Commerce and Retail
WhatsApp chatbots have a wide range of applications in retail and e-commerce businesses. This includes sending customers curated product offers and recommendations. Chatbots can be used to assist customers by providing reviews and detailed product information.
Chatbots can be programmed to answer simple customer queries related to pricing, shipping and delivery. Chatbots can be used to enable customers to track orders live via WhatsApp in real time.
Apart from sending personalized promotional messages based on a customer’s recent browsing history and preferences, WhatsApp chatbots can also be designed to obtain feedback after a customer makes a purchase.
In case of disputes, exchanges and return requests WhatsApp chatbots can provide swift and speedy assistance making each and every customer feel that their issues are being taken seriously.
Real Estate
Real estate businesses can use WhatsApp to improve customer service by making it possible for them to schedule site viewings and notify them about new property listings.
WhatsApp chatbots can answer important questions such as property price, location and accessibility.
Chatbots can further be useful by helping in the collection of customer feedback and preferences thereby empowering you to send promotional messages tailored to a customer’s individual requirements.
Finance and Banking
WhatsApp chatbots can be used in a variety of different scenarios when it comes to banking and finance-related services. Chatbots can be utilized to deliver quick transactional notifications to customers via WhatsApp whenever they transfer money. Doing so would greatly enhance security and foster a sense of trust among customers.
WhatsApp chatbots can also be used to send regular financial tips and investment advice. They can also answer relatively simple customer queries related to investment options, banking policies and the onboarding process.
Customers can be given the option to quickly get to know their account balance by texting your chatbot on WhatsApp. Chatbots may also be leveraged to deliver advertising messages for financial products and schemes.
WhatsApp chatbots can pretty much be used in every single single industry and using them will almost always benefit your company or organization in some or the other way. Just to name some more, WhatsApp chatbots can be used in industries such as logistics and transportation, education, travel and hospitality, telecom, hotels and restaurants and even government and public welfare organizations.
Several popular and reputable companies take advantage of WhatsApp chatbots to meet various needs. Starbucks which is a distinguished beverage company has an option of running their loyalty programs by using a WhatsApp chatbot. Other eminent companies such as Larsen & Toubro, Unilever, Nissan, Cardekho etc. use WhatsApp chatbots to better serve their customers. If these top market leaders are using WhatsApp chatbots, why not you?
Best Practices to Build an Amazing WhatsApp Chatbot
Building a WhatsApp chatbot can be tricky and it must be kept in mind that these chatbots are probably the first impressions that a customer will have of your company which is the reason why it becomes all the more important to intricately and elaborately design your chatbot in such a way so that it matches your brand’s identity and caters to your customers needs in the most efficacious manner.
Take into account the following tips to make sure you create the best possible flows for your chatbot:
Humanize Your Chatbot
Most people are not interested in conversing with a bot and why would they be? People have a general perception that talking to bots which are basically machine learning models can be dry and boring. Humans crave to speak with other humans and that is our nature. This is the exact reason why it becomes important to make your bot converse in as human-like a manner as possible.
Maybe you can make your bot introduce itself to your customers by a name. You can program the chatbot to chat in a friendly and conversational tone. Make sure you incorporate your brand personality in your chatbot.
Be Transparent
Make it clear to your users that they are indeed speaking to a bot. Although it is important to design your bot as human-like as possible it is essential to let your users know that they are conversing with a chatbot and the messages are actually automated. No matter how sophisticated or advanced your chatbot is, let your users know about it so they don’t feel cheated later on.
Incorporate your Brand Personality
Each brand has its own unique identity and personality. Having a brand personality can be valuable as it helps customers identify and associate themselves more with the brand and enhances customer relationships. Your brand personality is largely dependent on what your brand stands for.
If your brand is a luxury brand your bot can use a more formal language. If it is a fast food brand it can help to use more jovial and friendly language. If it is a service that you are offering you can program your bot to be more professional. Think of it like creating a fictional character by giving them specific character qualities.
Automate Effectively
Design your bot to answer the most common and frequently asked questions. Integration with AI to make your bot AI-powered can be a great step to provide detailed and instant answers to your customers.
Create User-Centric Flows
Create simple conversation paths that are user-friendly and optimized to deliver according to specific needs. Do not implement complex conversation paths and see to it that your chatbot can take care of the most commonly asked questions.
Provide a Human Gateway
It is always better to give your customers the option to chat with a real human to sort out issues. Chatbots can handle most simple queries but if a customer feels the need to chat with human customer support it is important to make it convenient for them and make it easily accessible by providing a channel to live human agents.
Update and Improve
Constantly improve the chatbot based on customer feedback and your own learning inputs. Remember, there is always room for improvement. Analyze customer complaints and performance data to continuously upgrade and refine your chatbot.
Security and Privacy
Ensure robust security systems are put in place to keep your customer’s data and privacy safe. Use encryptions to make sure chats are not leaked and are stored securely in alignment with data protection laws.
Building chatbots while keeping these points in mind will result in a chatbot that is convenient to use and is loved by your customers.
3 Easy Steps to Build WhatsApp Chatbot
WANotifier simplifies the process of WhatsApp chatbot creation, allowing businesses to build sophisticated, interactive chatbots without needing in-depth technical knowledge. Our tool’s user-friendly interface and robust features make it an ideal choice for businesses looking to leverage WhatsApp chatbots effectively.
Here’s how you can get started:
Step 1 – Create your WANotifier account and setup WhatsApp API
The first step is to create your free account with WANotifier and connect your phone number with WhatsApp API.
As mentioned earlier building chatbots is not possible using the free WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business apps so you need to use the WhatsApp API offering provided by Meta.
You can either use this API by building a custom system that requires you to know how to code. Or you can use one of the pre-build tools like WANotifier to use the API. In this article, we’re seeing how you can use the WhatsApp API with no coding knowledge.
To help you with the setup, you can refer to your detailed article on how to set up your WANotifier account.
After your WANotifier account is ready with WhatsApp API setup, you’ll be redirected to your dashboard. Once you’re there, you are ready to move to the next step.
Step 2 – Build Your Bot
From the Dashboard sidebar go to Automations > Bots page and then create on the Add New button to start creating a new bot. You will land on a page similar to the following:
On this page, you will find an intuitive, easy-to-use drag-and-drop bot builder that you can use to build complex WhatsApp chatbots with no coding knowledge required. Before we start building a bot, let’s understand a few basic components of the bot builder:
1. Nodes
These are the building blocks of your bot’s logic, representing different actions or decisions your bot can make. In our chatbot builder there are 4 different categories of nodes:
- Start and End Nodes – Your flow should have a clear starting point and an endpoint to define the conversation’s beginning and closure. For these, you need to use the Start and the End nodes. A bot must always start with a Start node and end with an End node.
- Trigger Nodes: These nodes wait for user input and trigger your chatbot if certain conditions are met. For example, the New message received trigger node would trigger the chatbot when someone messages you for the very first time. Similarly, User message matches node would trigger the chat when the user message matches one of the configured trigger words/phrases.
- Action Nodes: These nodes perform specific actions like sending messages or message templates, updating contact information like tags, lists or attributes, adding a delay or sending custom API requests to your API URLs.
- Conditional Nodes: These nodes help you to direct the flow of your chatbot based on certain conditions or user inputs. For example, you can wait to check the user’s response and then direct the bot to one or the other action nodes.
2. Edges
These are the connecting lines that you use to connect various nodes. They’re used to illustrate the path your bot should take based on certain conditions or actions.
3. Handles
These are the connection points where edges connect to nodes, determining the flow’s direction.
To understand these components further in detail, you can refer to the image below.
Now that you understand the different components of bot builder, let’s build your first bot.
Putting it all together
- Begin by adding a Trigger node to the Start node. This trigger node will be responsible for starting the chatbot on user action.
- Progressively add other Action and Conditional nodes, connecting them with edges to define your bot’s behavior.
- Customize each node by clicking on the edit icon according to your needs, specifying messages, conditions, or API endpoints.
- Add an End node at the bottom and connect all the open handles to this node.
Once you’re done, save the bot, enable it using the toggle and then save it again. Your bot is now live.
Step 3 – Test Your Bot
After saving your bot, test the bot flow thoroughly to ensure it behaves as expected, making adjustments as necessary. Try triggering the chatbot from various WhatsApp numbers and with different combinations of messages to check if the flow happens properly for each condition.
Once tested, your bot will be ready for prime time!
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a WhatsApp chatbot?
A WhatsApp chatbot is a software or a system that can be used to automate the process of communication with people on WhatsApp. Chatbots can be used to assist people by providing information, guidance and timely responses without the need for human support staff.
Can I use WhatsApp chatbots for free?
WhatsApp chatbots require WhatsApp API to function and WhatsApp API is not free.
How much does a WhatsApp chatbot cost?
The cost of a WhatsApp chatbot depends entirely on the provider you decide to go with or if you are building your own chatbot. There is a charge for the tool that you decide to use. Then there is also cost of WhatsApp API which varies across different providers who add their markup charges over WhatsApp API charges. With WANotifier however, we do not charge any extra markup and over tool charges are also quite affordable!
Are WhatsApp chatbots safe?
Yes, using WhatsApp chatbots is completely safe and secure. Although chatbots can read and interpret messages sent to them, all personal messages sent to them are end-to-end encrypted, so no one, not even Meta can view those messages.
What are the disadvantages of using a WhatsApp chatbot?
The only main disadvantages are the initial setup costs and the lack of human emotions. However, these disadvantages are greatly outweighed by the benefits that come along with using WhatsApp chatbots.
Wrapping up
WhatsApp chatbots represent a dynamic and powerful tool for businesses, offering a new level of interaction and service. With WANotifier, creating a sophisticated chatbot is accessible and straightforward, allowing businesses to harness the full potential of automated customer interactions.
By following these steps, you can develop a WhatsApp chatbot that not only meets your business needs but also helps you provide a delightful customer experience.
