5 ways of making WhatsApp Business API work for your company

November 12, 2021

Employ more than 3 staff?

Want to know how to make the most of WhatsApp API Business Accounts?

Want to automate, integrate and collaborate with WhatsApp?

Then read on…….

1. Allow customers to start a chat from your website, which we call, Web2WhatsApp

This might sound quite simple, and if you are one-man-band, this is easy with WhatsApp for Business. If you have a team of customer facing staff, or indeed, multiple teams in multiple locations, then Stitch can help your customers start a chat, with the correct team in WhatsApp with just one click from your website.

From a basic floating widget on the bottom right of your page, so specific call to actions from a particular product or service from your website, then we can make it easy for a customer to reach out to your brand via WhatsApp.

Finally, the contact us form. We can initiate an automated WhatsApp message the moment someone presses “submit” to speed up the customer engagement process.

2. Automate your 3rd party lead source, known to Stitch customers as Lead2WhatsApp

For many businesses, leads from 3rd party sources/marketplaces are the lifeblood of their sales growth. Speed of response is of the essence.

With Lead2WhatsApp, we can respond to your customers enquiries in WhatsApp within seconds. Our bots can pre-qualify and ask questions before handing over to one of your sales or service teams.

Not only does this give a great customer experience, our clients enjoy a 90% delivery rate, of which over 75% of customers will respond within minutes of receiving a WhatsApp message from you.

Any whilst you may choose to call your lead, you could simply pick up where the bot started, and simply start building the relationship with your prospect in WhatsApp.

By embedding your brand, within their own WhatsApp account on their mobile, you will be at the heart of your customers inbox, and be accessible to their questions over messaging, whilst your competitors are still floundering round, sending emails that never get opened or read, often sitting their in a junk/spam folder.

3. Deflect unanswered phone calls to WhatsApp chat with Voice2WhatsApp

Voicemail is very 90’s, and 75% of callers will hang up rather than leave a message. So, Voicemail on a mainline number is not really an option if you want to maintain high levels of customer service, or worst still, have sales leads hang up and call your competitors.

Call answering service providers bridge this gap for many UK businesses. The call answering provider will answer the call (typically overflowed by your phone system), the callers message is taken, and the call answering provider will forward, by email, the details of the caller & message to your respective sales or service teams.

The caller then has to wait for someone to get back in touch and as many B2C’s will know that the call answer rate is sub 25%, leaving a painful mix of telephone tag, coupled with trying to communicate with a consumer via email, of which it is widely accepted that has poor open & read rates of less than 30%. Clearly, following up these missed calls is a painful process for all businesses, with many customers falling through the holes in this process.

With Voice2WhatsApp, you can now save money on your call answering provider, and greatly improve the consumer experience, by simply moving the customer into a WhatsApp chat when their call isn’t being answered.

How it works:

When your caller is not being answered, your phone system can be programmed to say something like; “sorry to keep you waiting, please continue to hold, or press 1 to start a WhatsApp chat”.

The customer opt in for this is incredibly high, so much so that many of our clients have managed to slash their call answering costs by between 60% and 80%. Not only can we move the conversation from voice to messaging, our bots can be set up to pre-qualify, and even assign chats to the appropriate team in your business.

By moving the conversation to an asynchronous chat, both sales/service team and customer can progress the issue in the most convenient messaging channel in the UK.

4. QR Codes and NFC

Open up your business in ways you didn’t think were possible. From shop windows, mailshots, business cards, you can now speed up the communication process and start engaging with your audience, greatly increasing lead volume, as every enquiry is converted into a conversation there and then.

More importantly, you can now start to track the effectiveness of your “off-digital” campaigns, to calculate which ones perform the best, to give you the best ROI.

QR codes pointing to websites don’t always turn into conversations. But the moment someone starts a WhatsApp chat with you, it’s a converted lead, not just a site visitor.

Leveraging QR codes is a great way to stand out from your competitors, increase your conversions and ensure your sales & service teams are easy to do business with.

5. Outbound notification templates

We’ve looked at 4 ways of driving inbound conversations into your business, from various “start” or “entry” points. As explained, we can automate these various journeys using our automation bots to buy-time to respond, as well as save time on lead qualification.

These have all been very much, consumer “opted-in” customer journeys, but for many sales & service teams, there is a strong demand to improve the communication when they are the ones trying to reach a customer or prospect.

Rather than playing telephone tag, or sending emails that people never see, enable your staff to follow up (send to individuals or bulk broadcast) to customers in a channel with a 95%+ open and read rate.

Follow up a phone call that isn’t answered via WhatsApp. Trying to arrange a time for a prospect to visit your showroom? Follow up in WhatsApp. Need feedback from a prospect after viewing a property? No problem, follow up in WhatsApp. The numbers don’t lie – and you will get a 7 times greater response in WhatsApp compared to email, in a much shorter time period.

Conclusion

Until recently, phone & email represent the only form of communication available. The poor answer rates, and low open rates of these channels are causing your business to fall into one of these categories:

  1. Staff are being forced to use WhatsApp on mobile devices to bypass these channels as they have realised that its much quicker. The downside to this, is this a GDPR breach and a violation of WhatsApp’s terms of business. These chats are all isolated, team members are in the dark as there is no centralisation, and there is no record of these communications in the CRM.
  2. The business is not keeping up with digital trends and failing to adopt a communication model befitting today’s consumer. As competitor brands embrace WhatsApp as an official communication channel, customers will gravitate to organisations that are easy to do business with, easy to communicate with and those that enable a frictionless customer experience.

WhatsApp API from Stitch will:

  • Ensure your brand is “easy-to-do-business” with
  • Offer those a comms channel when the phone isn’t always convenient
  • 75% of consumers turn off notifications on their mobile. And for a mobile centric customer base, this should be obvious why WhatsApp is so important
  • Forms are not a form of communication and slow the engagement process down
  • Increase your web conversion rates
  • Pre-qualify all new leads with automation bots
  • Automate journeys from various “start” points
  • Route chats to teams without human intervention (therefore quicker)
  • Eliminate costs from unnecessary, backward thinking service providers.

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