In today’s time, social media has become an integral part of our life. Whether we need to connect with our friends, know about their personal life, or get updates about what is going across the world, almost everything is possible with social media. Social media is not limited to just connecting to the world but are also helping businesses across the world. Merchants are leveraging these social media platforms for making business. The most popular example is social commerce in which merchants are selling items on social media platforms such as Facebook Marketplace, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. On these platforms, the products are listed with the buy button.
Apart from these platforms, WhatsApp is another major social media platform. It is a cross-platform messaging app by which you can be in touch with your friends and family. Apart from one-to-one communication, it is a golden platform for online retailers to engage with their patrons. The previous year, WhatsApp came with its Business Services for online brands and retailers. They can scale their customer service to offer new messaging tools and insights. However, it is not powerful enough for sending important order updates. In today’s era, a single notification on mobile is enough to catch attention, it is time to automate the notifications of your e-commerce store for sending a highly personalized e-commerce experience to your customers.
Whatsapp is having more than 1.5 billion monthly users globally. It is the most used messaging app across the world. Now, the custom-built WhatsApp e-commerce virtual assistant has become an excellent way of a better engagement of the customer with your store and improving the conversion rate.
The WhatsApp Chatbot is like any other chatbot but runs on the end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp platform and the customers would be able to communicate with your platform through simple WhatsApp messages.
Benefits of using WhatsApp Chatbot for your online store:
In the online business, the most challenging task is to convert your online traffic into paying patrons and making profits through sales. Implementing a WhatsApp chatbot for your e-commerce business will automate the process of answering your customer queries and also exonerate your customer care team from the irrelevant customer queries along with efficiency improvement.
Here are some of the benefits of using a WhatsApp Chatbot for your site:
- Real-time conversations with the customer and instant answers to the queries
- Companies are able to assist their customers to chat on their most preferred platform and enhance the shopping experience
- Customers can take quick actions for their queries solutions
- Build trust and loyalty among the customers
- Highly secure communication with end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp
- Achieve better brand recognition
How WhatsApp Chatbot is different from other platforms?
There are many different factors which make WhatsApp Chatbot foremost over the other platforms. Firstly, millions of people are already using WhatsApp hence they don’t need to put any effort into familiarizing themselves with a new platform. Here are the main advantages of using WhatsApp Chatbot over any other platform:
1. Easy-to-use interface:
The chat interface of WhatsApp is so simple that a person of any age can use it. Probably, this is the main reason why it becomes such a huge hit. The users can receive real-time updates for their products on WhatsApp. It means that users can select deals of their choice for the product categories and they don’t need to navigate for the entire site but can go for their chosen products.
2. Multi-action engagement:
The WhatsApp chat bots allow you to take various different actions as per the conversational flow. A customer can browse for making a purchase or can raise tickets. They have access to multiple touchpoints in the WhatsApp Chatbot for e-commerce. Hence, as an online merchant, you can attract & retain customers using the conversational marketing and engagement potential of WhatsApp chatbots.
3. Power of broadcasting and groups:
Knowing your customers gives you many serious advantages for your business. With WhatsApp chatbots, you can have a two-way conversation with your customers. In fact, you can create groups of customers on WhatsApp and send them the same message at once. This feature is highly useful to reach a wider audience at once. You can send promotional messages and discount coupons within a group.
4. Ease of Access:
You can leverage click-to-WhatsApp feature on Facebook ads. This feature is useful to engage the target audiences in real-time by just clicking on a relevant ad.
5. Chat history & Backup:
Another benefit of using the WhatsApp chatbot is that the users can take a backup of the conversations. The companies can also keep track of the previous interactions with their customers without any issue.
6. Easy To Deliver:
You can also leverage WhatsApp chatbot to provide a better customer delivery experience. There would be no hassle of finding the customer’s address. The customers just share their address location using the location feature of WhatsApp chat. It results in faster and easier delivery.
7. Automated Messages:
There may be scenarios when the customers are not able to reply or forget to reply to the queries. But with the WhatsApp Chatbot, you can reply to your customer even during non-working hours and can update their queries.
You can also get instant feedback for your customer service through WhatsApp Chatbot. You can use this data to serve them in the future.
8. Attaching Files:
As you know you can attach different time of files into a WhatsApp chat such as audio, video, image, document, text, location, and even contacts. They can leverage WhatsApp chatbots for answering customer queries with better engagement.
You can imagine the satisfaction level of a customer when they want to buy a similar dress that they bought a month ago but is no longer in stock, and you notify them via WhatsApp with the product picture.
Different Use Cases of Whatsapp Chat in Magento:
Let’s know how you can use WhatsApp Chat for your Magento Store:
a. Lead Generation:
This is the most important stage for generating sales. Using WhatsApp Chat in your Magento store will allow you to automate the lead generation process and get the details of the customers just by providing them with a simple click-to-chat link. When the customer will initiate the chat for a query you will automatically get his basic details such as contact number, name, mail, etc. You can implement a powerful call to action by any of these following ways:
- Product/Category Button: The customers can get notification or updates through WhatsApp. For instance, they can allow getting an alert or notification when the product they wish is available in stock.
- Invite to chat: WhatsApp Chat is a great way to invite your website visitor on a 2-way WhatsApp Chat and get their queries through WhatsApp.
- Advertisements: You can also use the click-to-WhatsApp approach in your ad campaigns. So, when the customer will click on your Facebook or WhatsApp ad, he will be redirected to the WhatsApp chat invitation for better engagement.
b. Order Placement:
WhatsApp is a great platform to perform initiation to repeat sale on a single-channel experience. The customer can browse for products and make an order through WhatsApp. They don’t have to rely on any other platform. Ecommerce companies can also use WhatsApp chatbot to push data directly to their CRM or database.
c. Refund or Replacement Management:
In e-commerce, refund & replacement is maybe the most complex stage in customer flow. It should be delivered with caution else it will lead to a bad reputation of your company. On the other hand, a smooth refund or replacement procedure will create a better image in customers’ minds. It will result in long-term retention and customer loyalty.
d. Payment Related Queries Management:
As the volume of sales in e-commerce is continuously increasing, it is becoming difficult to manage the payment related queries. A bad payment can make you lose your sale as well as the customer. You can use WhatsApp chatbot for ensuring high-level payment related queries just by directing the customers to customer service executives.
e. FAQ Automation:
In the e-commerce journey, most of the customers have many frequently asked questions to get assured for the purchase. Generally, there is a separate FAQ section on the website for providing product and company information, size chart, payment options etc. You may lose your customers if you aren’t answering customers’ most frequent queries.
WhatsApp Chatbots are very useful for handling the FAQs and answering the customer queries precisely. It is also helpful in increasing the customer retention rate and reducing the ticket volumes.
f. Post-Sale Support:
When the customers’ receive their product they may require assistance for installing or using the product. For this purpose, they may often reach the customer care executive. WhatsApp chatbots can also handle this post-sale support to give installation or how-to instructions.
g. Increase Referrals:
Data shows that the referred customers have high customer retention rate and lifetime value. You can make the referral process easier with the help of WhatsApp chatbot as you can customize the messaging on the basis of prior interaction. You also don’t need to get an e-mail address and can provide more incentives to shared referrals.
h. Product Recommendations:
Recommending products by the bot has not been taken to its full potential yet. But still, bespoke product recommendations are leveraging through WhatsApp chatbots to a great extent. You just need to leverage this opportunity when the customer is already in conversation with you. Make use of images, gifts, and videos, to give product recommendations.
i. Feedback Collection:
Feedback collection is a very important task as you can realize what the customer is thinking about your service and then you can take prompt actions to improve it. WhatsApp chatbots make it easier to collect the feedback from your customers.
WhatsApp already has permission to use the device camera, hence you can politely ask them to take photos or record a video of them using the product and send it to you.
Popular Companies Using WhatsApp Chatbot:
1. MakeMyTrip:
MakeMyTrip is one of the market leaders in providing travel services such as flight tickets, hotels, holiday packages, cab facility and much more for both domestic and international holidays. It is using WhatsApp chatbots for providing services such as checking PNR status of booked tickets or live train running status through WhatsApp.
The customers have to just save the MakeMyTrip number and send a text message along with the train number. Just by doing this, they will get all details of the train along with its running status. It is also using WhatsApp chatbots for promotional messages, vouchers, etc.
2. BookMyShow:
This is one of the oldest and biggest movie ticket booking platforms which is using WhatsApp as a default ticket confirmation platform. The company uses the WhatsApp API to send the booked tickets to users on WhatsApp with either a confirmation text or a QR code with an email.
3. Pandora:
Pandora is a renowned company with hundreds of stores across the world and a multilingual online shop. It is using WhatsApp chatbot for offering customer service through one-to-one chat. It is also leveraging other capabilities of WhatsApp Chatbot such as product recommendations, product availability, campaigns, and much more.
Tips for using WhatsApp Chatbots for your E-commerce Store:
As an e-commerce store owner you must aim to provide a best level customer shopping experience for making their shopping journey exciting and personal. One-to-one conversation with the WhatsApp chatbots can help you in achieving this. Here are some tips that you can follow for building your own WhatsApp Chatbot and offering an exceptional customer experience.
1. Clear & Transparent Communication:
Although the chatbots are able to provide a communication experience as a human but do not let your customers forget that they are talking to a chatbots and not a human. The communication shouldn’t be complex and the customers should be able to interact with the chatbots without any hassle.
2. Know when to involve the human customer agent:
There may be scenarios when the chatbots will not have answers for the customer’s queries. At such a moment, the chatbots should refer the customer to a real customer agent instead of giving the same replies to the customer.
3. Customer Privacy Protection:
You should never let the WhatsApp chatbots get too intrusive so as to protect the customer’s privacy. Safeguard and protect the customers’ information and allow the customer chatbots to interact only when it is asked.
Wrapping Up:
WhatsApp Chatbot can be the next bigger face of customer service across the world. It is reliable, affordable and convenient for you as well as the customers. At Ceymox Technologies, we are having expertise in implementing such integrations in your Magento store. We are certified Magento developers and have a great experience in meeting every exceptional Magento requirement.
