Introduction
Recently, WhatsApp has emerged as more than just a communication tool. It is a fast-growing digital marketing platform. WhatsApp has directly connected millions of small and medium enterprises to its potential customers. Every brand allocates a significant budget for WhatsApp marketing with other social media platforms.
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WhatsApp features like quick replies, click-to-chat ads, WhatsApp broadcasts, etc. boost marketing and support outreach. In addition, the WhatsApp chatbot offers boundless potential to reach a large audience, personalize engagements, and support users round-the-clock.
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Reports suggest that WhatsApp chatbots can offer a 500% increase in lead generation.
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With the help of WhatsApp business API, businesses can expand the potential of WhatsApp chatbots more efficiently. So, now let’s proceed further to understand how you can create a WhatsApp chatbot.
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We will also explore its benefits, how it works, and its best practices for successful functioning.
What is a WhatsApp Chatbot?
A WhatsApp Chatbot is an in-app AI chatbot program designed for businesses to support their customer engagements. These WhatsApp chatbots are either rule-based or NLP-based AI programs, leveraging WhatsApp to enhance and automate communication between companies and users.
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These chatbots achieve near-human-like conversational fluency using advanced AI features. It enables them to personalize responses, reply with empathy, and maintain a consistent brand voice throughout their interactions.
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However, a chatbot is not an integral feature of WhatsApp business apps, and companies need to access WhatsApp Business API to explore chatbot functionality. Â
How does a WhatsApp Chatbot work?
A chatbot harnesses the capabilities of AI and NLP to engage and interact with users. It follows pre-defined steps to engage in conversations with users.
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- 1. A query from a user as a trigger for the chatbot to activate. It reads or captures the query to proceed to the next step.
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- 2. Based on its comprehension of the query, it prepares its next step to respond with an appropriate message or fetch specific information for the user query.
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- 3. The user query defines the steps a chatbot needs to take to complete its response. For example, if a user messages to return/refund an item, the chatbot checks if the item is returnable.
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- If it’s a returnable item, the chatbot will confirm the return date and confirm. If it’s not a returnable item, the chatbot will choose to inform the customer and offer a refund without a return. Â
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- Efficiently designed chatbots can respond accurately to user queries with minimal back-and-forth in the conversations, improving customer experience.
Why you should use a WhatsApp Chatbot for your business?
The efficiency and seamless communication abilities of a chatbot on various other digital platforms are widely evident. However, WhatsApp chatbots’ capabilities go beyond just communication.
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Improve customer service
Customer service is an essential function of your business. Positive and satisfactory customer service can build your brand image and loyalty to ensure customer retention.
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A WhatsApp chatbot improves customer service by instantly responding to queries or answering questions beyond business hours. Prompt customer service positively impacts customer satisfaction, conveys the user’s value to the brand, and fosters brand loyalty.
Automate communications
One of the features of chatbots is their ability to automate repetitive tasks. Whether answering FAQs, sending follow-up messages and reminders, or sending promotional campaigns, a WhatsApp chatbot can do it all effortlessly. It ensures your communication is seamless and consistent.
Boost customer engagement
NLP-based conversational AI chatbots are creating waves for their accurate human-like interactions. Such chatbots can train to interact in multiple native languages.Advanced AI chatbots can detect human sentiments, recognize language ambiguity, and show a strong contextual understanding, which enables them to create interactive conversations.
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Such ability of chatbots allows them to nurture relationships for lead conversions and build rapport for customer loyalty.
Establish brand image
A consistent brand image helps create targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with user ideas. A chatbot can help businesses maintain this consistent brand image by strictly infusing brand voice through every interaction.
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Companies can train their chatbots to maintain unique greeting messages, message template types, or icons and GIFs to convey a particular brand image in every interaction.
Personalize experience
The next-generation customer expects enhanced personalization that precisely addresses their concerns or queries. A chatbot can gather user data from past order history, conversations, or browsing to tailor conversations or offer recommendations. Personalization conveys to users that they are valued, and businesses are making efforts to address their concerns or improve their purchase experience.
Enhance marketing
Recently, instant messaging has emerged as the most preferred form of communication. Data confirms that WhatsApp has a remarkable open rate compared to emails and SMS. A WhatsApp chatbot is like a super-efficient assistant, ensuring your messages are scheduled at the right time and automating follow-ups or reminders.
How WhatsApp business API is significant in WhatsApp chatbot functioning?
WhatsApp Business API is a specially designed application that connects WhatsApp Business to a user-friendly interface. There are several third-party WhatsApp Business Service Providers (BSP) that provide these interfaces.
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A WhatsApp Business API is significant in WhatsApp chatbot functioning as WhatsApp Business does not allow chatbot creation without API integration. Additionally, configuring a chatbot on WhatsApp Business involves heavy technical knowledge. Hence, it is not possible without expert experience.
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Furthermore, the WhatsApp Business app offers simple automation like away messages and enables a maximum of 4 agents to manage the bot.
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On the contrary, a WhatsApp Business API enables simple chatbot integrations by the WhatsApp Business Provider. It offers higher flexibility and customization in terms of functioning. These chatbots are designed with advanced NLP capabilities and are quick to respond to FAQs, personalize conversations, and respond in multiple languages.
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Since API favors CRM integration and WhatsApp Business, it allows your chatbot to access customer data and offer personalized services and support. Lastly, WhatsApp Business API allows multiple agents to access and manage chatbots. WhatsApp Business API expands the horizons for more intensive communication and support while providing a feasible platform for chatbots to function with maximum capacity. Â
How to create a WhatsApp chatbot for your business
Setting up a chatbot on WhatsApp may seem complex, given the many features and extensive volume of interactions happening on the platform. But, a clear blueprint of chatbot configuration will make it a cakewalk for any business.
1. Set up a WhatsApp Business account
A WhatsApp Business account is essential and foundational for any WhatsApp marketing activities. Furthermore, a WhatsApp Business account integrated with WhatsApp Business API is important for building an efficient chatbot.
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Your WhatsApp Business profile lends you authority and credibility to initiate promotional activities on WhatsApp, while an approved business profile will also ensure seamless support from Meta. Â
2. Set up your WhatsApp Business API
While you can apply to Meta directly to access a WhatsApp Business API from your business account, the process can be complex and time-consuming. WhatsApp Business API providers like Kenyt.ai is an authorized WhatsApp cloud API providers from Meta, ensuring the process is seamless and hassle-free for businesses.
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Additionally, you gain multiple benefits while accessing a WhatsApp cloud API from Kenyt, such as;
• No intermediary charges,
• Post-paid billing
• Lower per-message cost
• Green-tick verification
• Product catalog sharing
• Improved customer experience
• Sales navigation
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3. Select a WhatsApp chatbot provider
In today’s market, there are many reliable chatbot providers who offer customizable and advanced AI chatbots that can be easily built and seamlessly integrated into applications. You can choose to build your WhatsApp chatbot or reach out to a reliable chatbot provider.
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Among several WhatsApp marketing providers, Kenyt.ai is a name to recognize for its all-efficient, feature-rich WhatsApp marketing platform. In addition, Kenyt offers a conversational AI-powered NLP chatbot for WhatsApp automation that boosts a 5X faster lead conversion.
4. Define the chatbot conversation flow
While planning the conversation flow, it’s best to define the chatbot persona. This chatbot persona will represent your brand voice and tone through various interactions that it will have with users. It will ensure that the chatbot maintains a consistent brand image while users are conditioned to associate a specific brand image with your business.
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It is necessary to train it with appropriate responses to ensure your chatbot responds accurately and with a consistent brand voice. You can train your chatbot with answers to frequently asked questions, providing resources on your knowledge base. See that there are appropriate greetings and transition messages when human agents connect for further assistance.
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There is no standard for chatbot conversations, as every business has a unique brand voice. You can do your research to understand your customer segment and create a buyer persona to train your chatbot. Create possible conversation flows that resonate with your buyer persona and test your chatbot.
5. Test your chatbot
Before you go live, it’s best to test your chatbot under various use case scenarios of your operations. Plan multiple testing phases with employees and selective clients, then proceed to beta testing.
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You may find a few glitches and improvement areas that went unnoticed while designing the conversation flow. Refine the chatbot conversation script, test again, and schedule to go live.
6. Go live with your chatbot
Your chatbot is ready to go live once satisfactory refinement and testing are complete. Integrate it with your WhatsApp account and slowly extend its integration to social media for multi-channel user engagement possibility.
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Ready to collect feedback, frequent queries, conversation duration, and accuracy of chatbot responses to refine and enhance continuously changing user engagement scenarios.
Best practices of a successful WhatsApp chatbot
Following some practices while running a WhatsApp chatbot will ensure no hiccups throughout its customer engagement. Some of these best practices are as follows;
1. Add a persona
A chatbot is the first point of contact for users when they come to your website, WhatsApp, or social media. A chatbot must represent an appropriate brand voice and tone that assures users that your brand is the right choice to provide an appropriate product or service for their concerns.
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A consistent brand voice with a strategic brand persona will allow your chatbot to interact with a targeted set of customer segments and engage them successfully.
2. Add a human touch to chatbot responses
No one likes to chat with a robot when they have some concern running through their heads. So, ensure that your chatbot responses are not emotionless. Train your chatbot to adopt human-like natural conversation, which includes humor, empathy, or concern to connect and engage with your audience.
3. Personalize conversations
You can leverage customer data to tailor chatbot responses. Chatbots can access previous order details, product searches, wish lists, and size purchases to create a user profile and personalize conversation for more intimate interaction.
4. Collect feedback
No matter how many tests you may have run or performed beta test your chatbot, you may still encounter flaws or inconsistent response flows. Collecting feedback from users about their interaction with your chatbot will provide you with sufficient data to refine your chatbot conversation flow or the actions it needs to perform.
5. Seamless chat transfer
Whether your chatbot is new or experienced, be ready for the possibility that it may still fail to respond to a few complex questions. Hence, ensure a seamless chat transfer to a specialist agent who can accurately respond to the user. Instead of abruptly ending conversations or leaving users mid-way through the conversation, chatbots can transfer them to specialized teams to answer certain questions.
6. Safeguarding user information
User information is of utmost value, and effort should be directed to ensure user data collected through WhatsApp chatbots are safely stored away from unauthorized access and data breaches. Â
Conclusion
WhatsApp has significantly changed how people interact with each other. It has allowed a vast number of users across the globe to interact and engage with each other.WhatsApp Business API opens up immense opportunities for businesses to engage users, foster relationships, and extend support through the user-friendly WhatsApp. Â
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In this scenario, the WhatsApp chatbot emerges as a revolutionary torchbearer of user engagement, transforming customer experience, simplifying processes with automation, supporting round-the-clock, etc. WhatsApp Business API provides a flexible ground for chatbots to expand and refine their capabilities in interacting with users naturally.
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WhatsApp chatbots have established themselves as a strategic tool for businesses planning to grow and expand in this competitive digital market with continuously evolving customer expectations.Â
Frequently Asked Questions
No, it is not necessary to have technical expertise to create a WhatsApp chatbot, though having a tech-savvy background will help you understand technical terms and mechanisms. Many user-friendly and no-code chatbot AI chatbot platforms enable you to create advanced chatbots without much technical hassle.
Like any other chatbots, WhatsApp chatbots require a large volume of data to learn and improve. You can provide many questions and answers for the chatbot to learn your industry-specific nuances. Additionally, allow it access to your knowledge base resources to provide an accurate response to user queries.
Absolutely! You can use a WhatsApp chatbot for lead generation. During the interaction, the chatbot can collect specific user information, like phone number, email, name, and preferences. The chatbot transfers this data to the appropriate sales team for conversion.
Nisha Sneha
Nisha Sneha is a passionate content writer with 5 years of experience creating impactful content for SAAS products, new-age technologies, and software applications. Currently, she is contributing to Kenyt.AI by crafting engaging content for its readers. Creating captivating content that provides accurate information about the latest advancements in science and technology has been at the core of her creativity.
In addition to writing, she enjoys gardening, reading, and swimming as hobbies.
