Chatbots have been at the heart of many companies’ marketing strategies for some years now. In particular, the most widely used tool for this purpose is Facebook Messenger. But with the boom in the instant messaging application WhatsApp, more and more companies are looking for this alternative channel for communicating with their customers. Indeed, WhatsApp is a massively used application. Having a WhatsApp Business account connected to the WhatsAppAPI is therefore an excellent idea for your company. You can link a chatbot to it to assist your company’s staff. However, launching a WhatsApp chatbot can be tricky. What are the advantages of a WhatsApp chatbot? How do you create one in just a few steps? Here’s what you need to know in this guide.
What is a WhatsApp chatbot?
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence program capable of simulating a human conversation. Indeed, this AI can reproduce the human communication model and can interact with users on various messaging applications, websites or even mobile applications.
Various digital channels are already integrating chatbots, and have been for some years. These include Facebook Messenger and website chats. It’s only recently that the bot is present and supported by WhatsApp for commercial purposes, which clashes with the app’s original purpose.
However, to ensure responsible use of the WhatsApp Business account, certain restrictions have been imposed. These include:
- Chatbots can only be used by those who have the WhatsApp Business API;
- The WhatsApp conversation is initiated by the customer: no promotional push accepted;
- Chatbots can only be used to respond within the 24-hour “customer service window”.
In addition, direct referral from the chatbot to a human must be possible.
The benefits of using a WhatsApp chatbot
If there are two main advantages to using a WhatsApp chatbot, it’s the WhatsApp application itself and the chatbots. Today, WhatsApp has over two billion users, across all generations and all over the world.
On the one hand, for communication between the company and its customers, it is becoming one of the must-have applications. In fact, in 2020 alone, WhatsApp Business recorded over 50 million users worldwide. That’s more than ten times the number of users in 2019.
On the other hand, chatbots are increasingly becoming better allies as virtual assistants. Chatbots and other virtual assistants reduce the number of calls, chats and e-mails received by companies by 70%. Beyond their effectiveness for businesses, they are also appreciated by private individuals, who get quick answers to their questions. Creating a chatbot for your company can therefore bring many interesting benefits.
The different stages in creating a WhatsApp chatbot
In order to better manage high media volumes, and better respond to your customers’ various queries, don’t hesitate to integrate a chatbot into your WhatsApp messaging application. This can be done in just a few steps:
- Define the objectives of the WhatsApp chatbot ;
- Have a WhatsApp Business account;
- Access to the WhatsApp Business API (the most complicated);
- Find a chatbot partner (like Botnation);
- Create a persona for the chatbot;
- Building the chatbot ;
- Carry out tests and make any necessary improvements ;
- Put the chatbot into production.
Integrating such a bot into a messaging application like WhatsApp enables a completely different customer relationship experience.
Access to the WhatsApp Business API
In order to integrate the bot into WhatsApp for business use, access to the API is required. For this purpose, companies must have a WhatsApp Business account and have requested and obtained access to the API.
A chatbot integrated into your WhatsApp allows you to benefit from an automatic greeting, give quick predefined answers to frequent customer requests and many other advantages. To get the real chatbot interface, you need the WhatsApp Business API.
With it, medium-sized and large companies can easily upgrade their customer support with more flexible configurations. Access to this API is conditional on acceptance by WhatsApp.
Have Botnation create your chatbot
We can create a chatbot for you that can connect to the WhatsApp Business API to automatically communicate with your customers on WhatsApp. All without the need for human intervention. For more information, contact us today. We can guide you through the process of obtaining a WhatsApp Business API account.
Creating a persona for the WhatsApp chatbot
The technical requirements will be defined, with the aim of personalizing the chatbot to your corporate image. It must give customers a positive perception of your brand.
Building the WhatsApp chatbot
There are three types of chatbot:
- Those based on a decision tree;
- Keyword recognition ;
- Contextual ones, developed with NLP, AI and machine learning technologies.
The choice of which chatbot to build will depend on the objective to be achieved and the budget. The most advanced option when choosing this conversational tool is the contextual conversational agent. For a better user experience for your customers, integrate :
- Welcome message;
- User keywords and intentions ;
- Emojis and rich media;
- Variables (a container of information previously collected by the chatbot from other customers) ;
- Conversation flow;
- A human transfer.
Once completed, all that’s left to do is test your WhatsApp chatbot. This allows you to make any necessary improvements before putting it into production and promoting it to your customers.
Now you know more about WhatsApp chatbots. If you’d like some guidance on obtaining a WhatsApp Business account and getting the API, we can give you some advice.
If you’re looking to create a WhatsApp chatbot, contact us! Our expert teams can develop the chatbot you’re looking for.
