Why your contact center should be including WhatsApp in its omnichannel strategy 

Over the past decade, Meta’s WhatsApp application has exploded in popularity as an easy way for people to send texts by using WiFi and data, helping friends and family stay connected across borders without incurring mobile usage fees. Originally released in 2009, the app’s user base has grown steadily, currently standing at over 2 billion users. WhatsApp Business, a commerce-centric variant that allows businesses and brands to communicate with customers through the main WhatsApp interface, followed in 2018 with two different solutions: WhatsApp Business for small and medium-sized businesses, and the WhatsApp Business API for larger enterprises. 

It makes sense that an attempt would be made to harness that easy connectivity for business purposes. The open rate for SMS messages is an astounding 99%, compared to around 30% for email. Further, the WhatsApp platform already provides rich communication services–style communications for contact centers in the form of features like MMS and voice messages, and is widely available to anyone with a smartphone. It follows that WhatsApp Business was created to exploit a unique opportunity for 24/7 brand communication and allow enterprises to fine-tune specific parts of the customer journey, as well as both automate and carry out authentic interactions to deliver satisfying CX.  

WhatsApp is instrumental in finding ways to respond to the needs of the moment  

The business service is particularly well-adapted to send rich content such as brochures or store promotions and engage the customer with a personalized offer. That personalized offer can also mean helping the customer get what they want in a timely manner. WhatsApp’s trained chatbot gives the customer that extra channel. 

A trained chatbot can provide answers in natural language to the most common questions, giving customers a substantial resource for receiving instant answers at any time of day, as well as the capability to connect with a live agent for more complex or niche queries. WhatsApp Business contains APIs that connect to apps like those that run on natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) technology to power chatbots, thereby cutting down on queues by addressing more routine issues via automation. In doing so, contact center agents can focus on more complex issues, using their own skills to solve customer problems, deliver satisfying CX and help drive in customers. 

WhatsApp helps your contact center cultivate customer relationships 

WhatsApp started out as a communications channel for friends and family. The obvious benefit of having such a channel: building a sense of connection between people – is something contact centers can and should capitalize on with WhatsApp Business. Take, for instance, a contact center serving travelers. Travelers appreciate having travel information sent to them via WhatsApp upon purchase, including booking information and tickets with scannable QR codes. But that’s not all.  

Last minute changes to an itinerary happen all too often, and they can rattle a traveler, especially if their schedule is tight. Imagine, however, a situation when you’re about to board a flight and receive a WhatsApp notification with a gate change notice. If the connection is in another terminal, that may result in a flight delay to accommodate the sudden change and make sure all passengers board and get to their destination. Fortunately, WhatsApp can handle this, proving just how valuable of a resource the app can be, long after the transaction has been completed. 

WhatsApp helps your contact center address multiple parts of the customer journey 

The companies leveraging WhatsApp Business to advance their customer service goals have found that this channel helps them at different stages of the customer journey. For Carrefour, the French retail and wholesale giant, it’s all about the pre-purchase phase of the journey. They’ve deployed WhatsApp as part of their promotional strategy, aiming to use communication with potential customers to turn them into repeat ones.  Meanwhile, KLM, the world’s oldest operating airline, has found WhatsApp to be a perfect channel in the post-purchase phase. WhatsApp Business has made it possible to serve customers continuously on the way to their destination and cater to their needs. 

WhatsApp can also be used for gathering feedback. Not only can you keep track of channel performance through KPIs like read rate, but also industry standards such as net promoter score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), and customer satisfaction score (CSAT). While high feedback scores should not be the end goal of customer service, in today’s age of quick communication, WhatsApp is a valuable channel to add for your contact center solution whether you’re communicating with customers before, during or after a sale. That includes customer surveys, which can be sent to hundreds of customers at once as Hubspot points out. Additionally, surveys could garner responses more quickly thanks to the instantaneous nature of the channel, which means quicker metric calculations that help you know whether to adjust your CX strategy sooner. 

WhatsApp — an asset to your contact center’s omnichannel solution 

If you haven’t considered WhatsApp as a viable channel in your contact center’s omnichannel strategy, it’s high time to begin reaping the benefits for yourself. And if your contact center’s CCaaS solution isn’t capable of supporting messaging channels like WhatsApp, it’s also time to think about upgrading to the current generation. Odigo’s omnichannel offer is capable of supporting not only WhatsApp, but Messenger and other communication platforms for delivering top-notch CX in its agent console. If you’re ready to join the new generation of CCaaS solutions, arrange a call with one of our experts today. 

When planning an outbound campaign, organizations need to deliver it with care using the most appropriate automatic dialler in order to promote positive customer experiences. There is also a clear need to be aware of not only the regulations governing the outbound call center’s location, but also those that apply wherever your customers may be.