WhatsApp Chatbot: A Comprehensive Guide for 2024
Whatever your customer engagement strategy is, it’s almost impossible to drive anything meaningful without the integration of a WhatsApp chatbot. Consider this: 140B+ messages are sent daily by WhatsApp users - mostly between family and friends. However, since the introduction of WhatsApp Business, a big chunk of the messages have been exchanged between customers and businesses. WhatsApp chatbots guide these conversations at various touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
What Is a WhatsApp Chatbot?
A WhatsApp chatbot is an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant that enables business-customer interactions through the messaging channel. It leverages natural language processing (NLP) and other advanced technologies - such as machine learning, sentiment analysis, API integrations, and more - to understand and respond to customers in a conversational manner.
WhatsApp chatbots enable brands to engage customers and prospects at every step. With the integration of a bot on WhatsApp, brands can seamlessly drive acquisition, engagement, sales, and post-sales support.
Acquire 
WhatsApp chatbots help collect leads, run promotional campaigns, send product and service-related messages, and collect feedback to boost customer acquisition. Not only do these acquisition strategies help businesses understand their audience better but also drive higher conversions downstream.
Engage
Brands across sectors can employ diverse engagement strategies by implementing a WhatsApp chatbot. Appointment scheduling, customer support automation, event updates and reminders, and interactive quizzes and games, among others, are some of the use cases enabled by a bot integrated on the popular messaging app.
Sell
By leveraging chatbots, brands can turn WhatsApp into a powerful sales channel. Showcase products, deliver personalized product recommendations, and offer conversational buying guidance like a virtual human sales assistant. This not only improves conversion rates, but also elevates customer experience by helping them make informed purchase decisions.
Support
Businesses can seamlessly scale customer support and drive post-sales engagement like product upsell and cross-sell promotions to increase average order value (AOV) and improve customer satisfaction. With an AI Assistant, they could slash response times, resolve routine queries (FAQs, order tracking and updates, returns and refunds, etc.) without human intervention, and improve agent agent efficiency.
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Discovery & Instant Opt-In
Online Channels: Incorporate deep links, banners, or contact forms on your website to seamlessly collect user details. This provides a convenient and user-friendly way for individuals to grant consent.
IVR Deflection: Redirecting Interactive Voice Response (IVR) calls to WhatsApp serves as an effective strategy. This allows users engaging with your IVR system to seamlessly transition to WhatsApp.
Virtual Number Calls: Simplify the opt-in process by offering users the option to initiate the conversation through a simple phone call to your virtual number. This low-effort option can encourage user participation.
A frictionless opt-in process is vital, and businesses must communicate the value and benefits users will receive by opting in. By providing multiple touchpoints and options, brands can cater to diverse user preferences, making the opt-in experience more accessible and appealing.
Enhanced UI
WhatsApp for business contains elements that make the conversational experience simpler and more interactive. These include quick replies and buttons, allowing users to progress faster in their conversations with businesses.
The WhatsApp Business App for small businesses includes a catalog feature to create and showcase products and services. The catalog can be shared across multiple channels.
In addition, the Cart feature allows businesses to streamline order management and facilitate a superior shopping experience. Broadcast is another dynamic feature for businesses to announce promotions, special offers, and display new inventory to multiple customers simultaneously. Flows is one of the latest WhatsApp Business features designed to bring structure to business-customer interactions. It enables businesses to automate FAQs, appointment scheduling, query resolution, and other routine customer support tasks.
Collect Payment
Customers can make direct payments on WhatsApp while they are in the purchase journey.
When people shop on WhatsApp, they’re always on the go, even when they’re shopping from home. They want to be able to browse and buy instantly.
Businesses can collect payments by incorporating secure payment options directly within the chat interface. Available payment gateways can be linked to the WhatsApp chatbot to allow customers to input payment details and complete transactions.
Brands can also use notifications as recurring payment reminders and collect payment hassle-free.
Enhanced Customer Service
Customer service is a key differentiator in customers choosing one brand over another. In fact, according to one research, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that provide great customer service.
24/7 Availability
Imagine a customer needing post-purchase support after regular business hours. With chatbots integrated on WhatsApp, businesses remain accessible to customers round the clock. Accessibility to customer support on demand increases customer satisfaction while making support more efficient.
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Smart Agent Routing for Complex Queries
A WhatsApp chatbot can intelligently direct complex queries to a capable human agent for faster and efficient resolution. The bot facilitates a seamless transition from automated processes to human assistance for nuanced understanding and personalized support.
What Live Chat Agents in the Gen AI Era Mean for Customer Support
Omnichannel
WhatsApp chatbots help deliver a unified and consistent customer experience. Whether customers engage on WhatsApp, on the web, or another platform - the chatbot delivers a fluid experience, leading to increased convenience and better customer loyalty and retention.
Integrations
Haptik’s powerful ecosystem of 100+ integrations helps you seamlessly integrate with social media channels, support and agent platforms, payment gateways, and any software APIs to enhance customer experience.
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Why Haptik Is the Preferred WhatsApp BSP for Enterprises
Know our product differentiators for increased efficiency & revenue.
Official Meta Business Partner
Haptik is Meta’s official business partner, which ensures our customers get early access to new WhatsApp business features and thus a competitive edge over other businesses.
Scalability
The leading brands have partnered with Haptik because of our ability to handle scale. We’ve built the world’s largest WhatsApp chatbot that handled 30M+ conversations, sent 400M+ notifications to generate qualified leads, and helped collect 70K+ orders in just two months!
Gen AI-First Platform
Haptik’s Generative AI capabilities help our customers create contextual user-centric responses for quick replies based on the user’s query. In addition, our advanced NLU engine ensures customer interactions sound natural and human-like.
Custom Reports & Dashboards
Our cutting-edge analytics engine enables customers to build custom reports and dashboards to track metrics that truly matter to their business, including insights into WhatsApp campaigns, user journeys, and drop-offs.