WhatsApp Business Use Cases: Optimising The Customer Journey

In this article we discuss WhatsApp Business use cases and how the messaging app can be used to remove friction points along the customer journey. All companies need to continually optimize the customer journey. The ‘era of the customer’, where the customer comes first, means that viewing the world through the eyes of the consumer should be the main driver of business decisions. Done well, companies can gain incremental competitive advantage. Important to this is incorporating new and relevant touch points. The modern day consumer is present on an ever increasing amount of channels, and brands need to ensure that they are where their customers are. With 1.5 billion global users, WhatsApp is the most recent  touchpoint that brands need to incorporate into their customer journey. It is disruptive in the sense of its scale of reach, but also its potential to completely revolutionise how the customer journey is planned and optimised. This is how!

1- End to end customer journey within one conversation

Managing the customer journey from consideration to purchase can be difficult, particularly when there are so many different online and offline touch points to consider. Customers may seek product reviews via Google, delivery information on your website, reach out for post-purchase support via your helpline. Managing a multi touchpoint customer journey in an efficient and contextual way can be challenging. What if there was a way of managing all customer needs along the customer journey through one channel? With WhatsApp you can.

The key pillars of customer experience are convenience, personalisation and trust. Implementing WhatsApp as a channel along the customer journey boosts all these pillars. Customers have the convenience of reaching out on their favourite messaging app (less time consuming than searching for information online), the trust of knowing WhatsApp is encrypted, and personalization through contextual customer support. Contextual conversations are a given with WhatsApp, as all previous interactions are stored within one conversation.

2- Engaging Notifications

WhatsApp has open rates that exceed 90%. This, coupled with the fact that consumers use the app daily, make it the perfect channel to send your customers relevant and useful notifications acting as a replacement or support to SMS. In the travel industry, use cases include transaction details, booking summaries and tickets. For e-commerce, WhatsApp Business use cases include order confirmations, payment acknowledgement, delivery information and refund information. All these notifications are proactively saved under one chat, making it convenient and easily accessible for your customers.

3- Building lifelong relationships

The 1980s saw the era of contact centres, then the 2000s the era of the multichannel ticketing system. Today is the era of omnichannel conversational support, where customers can reach out via any channel and get immediate contextual support. This includes social media, messaging apps, email and voice. Brands need to have a presence on each channel to ensure they keep up and exceed customer expectation. WhatsApp is the latest channel that needs to be incorporated and has far more potential that is predecessors (FB Messenger and Twitter). This is because it is so widely used and plays such an important role in the consumer’s daily life.

Conversational support or marketing, by its nature, encourages lifelong relationships. Think about your WhatsApp chats with family, your conversations are stored for years. The same is the case when interacting with your consumers via WhatsApp. Companies are now able to build lifelong and humane relationships, which was never able to be the case previously (think about waiting in a call queue for hours). You can even connect a customer to the same agent automatically for their entire lifetime, allowing long term relationships to be built! The nature of relationships between companies and customers is changing, and WhatsApp is the medium in which they are managed.

4- Conversational Marketing

Throughout the ages, the way people have interacted has changed. Your grandparent would most likely have communicated by letter, with the time taken to receive and send a letter taking longer than a month (depending on the distance). Then came email, with communications being able to be sent and received via the internet. Today is the era of conversational communication via messaging apps. Almost all consumers now interact with their friends and family on daily basis via WhatsApp and, as this has become the norm, they expect to do the same with their favourite companies. Whether post service support or product enquires, customers expect to be able to reach out to companies on WhatsApp and get an immediate, contextual response. This provides an opportunity to companies who implement WhatsApp into their customer journey optimization strategy, as they are able to provide immediate response time with pro-active (as opposed to re-active) and contextual support. The power of communication has shifted from companies to the consumer, where an immediate response is expected no matter what time of day or week. WhatsApp allows companies to do this at scale.

“Your conversational marketing audience is much more insightful than your other channels. They’ll tell you in their own words how they want to interact with your business. There’s no inferring or guessing, like with web traffic.”

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Sooner or later all brands will be using WhatsApp, with those adopting early gaining competitive advantage through improved customer experience.

WhatsApp For Business Use Case 1 - E-commerce

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There are many potential frictions points within E-commerce that can be solved through implementing WhatsApp at all stages of the customer journey. Part of the process of optimising the customer journey with WhatsApp is mapping these friction points out. Once these friction points have been identified, you are able to solve these through WhatsApp.

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The result is a better customer experience driven by convenience, personalisation and quick response times.

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WhatsApp For Business Use Case 1 - Travel

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Companies operating in the travel industry rely heavily on loyalty and repeat purchase. Delivering an exceptional customer experience is therefore critical to maintaining competitive advantage. Through integrating WhatsApp into their customer journey strategy, companies in this space can iron out various friction points that traditionally the customer experiences.

Once these friction points have been identified, you are able to solve these through WhatsApp.

Many travel brands have already shifted much of their notification and booking processes to WhatsApp, for example KLM.

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