Since you have landed on this blog, I am sure you already understand the importance of engaging your customers on a channel that they are comfortable with the most.
WhatsApp has over 2 Billion active monthly users, hence where most of your customers are.
Now, you have three questions on your mind:
Well, we’ve got all the answers you are looking for.
In this blog we will discuss in detail about whatsapp chatbot and whether you need a WhatsApp chatbot for business. We will also see a step-by-step guide of how to create a WhatsApp bot in just 5 minutes. Grab onto your seats. We’re getting started now!
What is a WhatsApp chatbot?
A WhatsApp chatbot or WhatsApp bot is an automated software that uses Artificial Intelligence or pre-programmed rules to engage with your customers on WhatsApp.
The best example I can think of right now is Starbuck’s WhatsApp Chatbot. Starbuck’s WhatsApp bot allows you to place and pay the orders, gives personalized recommendations, promotes their products and much more. A WhatsApp bot combined with AI has endless capabilities that can take your business to the next level, be it a small business or a big enterprise.
Below is another example of a WhatsApp bot used by a travel company:
Engati's WhatsApp Chatbot uses AI and a proprietary NLP engine to intelligently interact with your customers. You can use them to answer customer questions about your products and services, share content, drive sales, and send notifications regarding orders, payments, shipping, and much more.
WhatsApp AI chatbots run over the WhatsApp Business API to intelligently engage with your customers, employees, students, and other types of users, without any need for human intervention.
Why should your business have its own WhatsApp bot?
If you have a very small clientele, you might be able to survive by manually responding to each message. But as your business grows, handling customer support will become harder. However, even if you have a limited customer base, there is still one major problem with manually answering every question - the lack of speed. Your customers will have to wait for you to get around to answering their questions. This means that more often than not, they won’t get an answer when they want it. That’s never a good idea.
eCommerce or retail businesses have seen 53% abandon checkouts by online shoppers due to lack of instant replies to their queries. So, if you’re interested in having satisfied customers and protecting your carts from abandonment, you should create WhatsApp AI chatbot for your business.
Here are some reasons to create your own WhatsApp Chatbot:
1. Improve customer engagement
2. Automate responses for frequently asked questions
3. Improve customer service
4. Increase conversion rates
5. 24/7 customer support and faster response time
How to create WhatsApp Chatbot For Business with Engati for free?
When it comes to creating a WhatsApp bot, you’ve got two choices:
- Code it in-house with your team
- Integrate a powerful, no-code chatbot platform on your digital channels
Building it with a no-code chatbot platform like Engati's conversational AI WhatsApp chatbot builder is the wiser choice. After all, why would you make the effort to put your time, cost and energy to code a chatbot when you can build your chatbot for WhatsApp with just a few clicks? This not only saves your valuable time but also a lot of resources which can be utilized for other important tasks.
Here are the steps on how to create a WhatsApp bot in 2024:
Prerequisites for creating WhatsApp Chatbot
Step 1: Create and login to Engati
- Select relevant option (In this case 'Send WhatsApp Marketing messages' or 'Automate engagement workflow on WhatsApp')
Step 2: Create the flow for your WhatsApp Chatbot
You can explore this feature and create the best conversation flow for anyone who is interacting with your business on WhatsApp. Creating a chat flow with Engati’s WhatsApp bot is as easy as “Join the Dots”. All you have to do is connect the right dots and create a logical conversation flow. You can automate all the responses with pre-made flow and message templates.
Step 3: Deploy and test your bot
How to deploy and test your WhatsApp bot?
Step 1: Setup and connect your WhatsApp Business account on Engati
- In the Engati portal, navigate to the “Configure” (⚙️) > “Deploy” tab > select “WhatsApp”.
- Under “Configure Provider” Choose “360Dialog” as your WhatsApp provider (doing this also allows you to create WhatsApp message templates that can be used for broadcast messages directly from the Engati portal).
- Now, to get started with WhatsApp AI chatbot you’re going to have to update a couple of fields:
- WhatsApp Business Phone Number
- WhatsApp Business API key
- Save the changes once you've added your mobile number & the WhatsApp bot API key.
fill in the details to get started with whatsapp bot
Step 2: Test your WhatsApp AI Chatbot
Your WhatsApp Chatbot is now ready. Use Engati’s sandbox feature to test your flow and deploy the bot!
Once you complete all the steps, you'll be able to access the HTML code that you can add to your website and create WhatsApp chatbot widget for free.
Along with this, you'll also get your WhatsApp QR code and Click-to-chat WhatsApp link for sharing it ahead.
Get the most out of your AI WhatsApp Chatbot by Engati
There are a lot of features in Engati’s WhatsApp Chatbot. You can either explore all the features on the portal or connect with our experts who can walk you though all the features and suggest hyper-personal strategies that align with your requirements.
Enagti has ready-to-implement chatbots for WhatsApp available for all industries and use cases - which reduces your go-to-market time with a 7 days free trial.
Use cases of WhatsApp Chatbot in different industries
WhatsApp Chatbot can cater to all the industries solving their problems in a very tailored manner. Here is the industry wise use cases of a WhatsApp Chatbot:
1. Retail and eCommerce:
WhatsApp Chatbot in Retail and eCommerce industry can automate customer interactions, help in managing orders, and providing instant support, which can improve sales and customer satisfaction.
👉 You may like: How do I use NLG and Chatbots for eCommerce?
2. Banking and Financial Services:
For BFSI, WhatsApp Chatbot can handle customer inquiries, provide account information, assist with transactions, and more. This will enhance the efficiency of customer service in financial institutions.
3. Healthcare:
In the healthcare industry, WhatsApp Chatbots can assist with appointment scheduling, patient inquiries, symptom checking, and providing information on medical services.
4. Education:
WhatsApp Chatbot in educational institutions can be used to manage student queries, enrollment processes, and provide information on courses and programs.
5. Travel and Hospitality:
WhatsApp Chatbots in the travel and hospitality industry can be used for booking management, customer inquiries, and providing information about travel plans, which enhances customer experiences in the travel and hospitality sectors.
6. Real Estate:
In the real estate domain, WhatsApp Chatbot can be used for managing inquiries, scheduling property viewings, and providing detailed information about properties.
👉 You may like: Improve customer experience in the real estate industry
7. Telecom:
Telecom industry can use WhatsApp Chatbot by automating customer service, managing user accounts, and providing instant support for common issues.
8. Logistics and Supply Chain:
Use cases of WhatsApp Chatbot in the logistics and supply chain industry can be tracking shipments, managing inventory, and handling customer queries.
9. Government and Public Sector:
Government and public sector can use WhatsApp Chatbot for public services, helping to streamline citizen inquiries and provide information about government services and various different policies.
These are just some of the key industries and domains where a WhatsApp bot can be a great solution to improve customer engagement, automate processes, and enhance overall efficiency.
Now, let's take a look at some examples of WhatsApp bots built by the best of brands and how to use WhatsApp AI chatbots!
WhatsApp Chatbot Example in Real World
Larsen & Toubro (L&T) needed a solution to engage their workforce of 3,30,000 employees across multiple sites, answer all their queries, and receive progress updates from them.
They deployed the chatbot WhatsApp operating in English and Hindi.
It facilitates communication between employees working at their various construction sites and off-site project managers. By sending questions to the workers and collecting their responses, the bot has reduced the time spent on daily reporting.
It has even simplified the process of tracking progress across multiple projects for project managers.
Poppy’s is another major retailer and eCommerce store that opted to use a WhatsApp chatbot free with Engati Live Chat. This power-packed combination of automation and the human touch helps with lead generation as well as customer support, ensuring that customers get all their questions answered instantly, irrespective of complexity!
Their bot can pull information about all their products and share it with customers in both English and Spanish.
Since catalogs are constantly changing, training the bot manually would not make sense. Poppy’s did not want to upload FAQs about every single product manually.
That’s why they opted to use DocuSense. Our DocuSense technology uses cognitive search to parse documents and answer customer questions based on the information in them.
The result? Customers get answers to all their questions, while Poppy’s team does not need to spend time manually training their bot!
Mall of the Emirates uses Engati to provide customer service and run its loyalty program. They use an intelligent chatbot for WhatsApp, along with Live Chat, to give their patrons a fantastic experience.
Their bot uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to pull details from receipts uploaded by guests. So, all they need to do is send their receipts to the bot, and their loyalty points are automatically allocated without human intervention.
- Kolkata Municipal Corporation - WhatsApp
- Dubai Properties - WhatsApp
- Dubai Asset Management - WhatsApp
- Danube Properties - WhatsApp
- Tokio Marine Life Insurance - WhatsApp
- Blaupunkt Audio - WhatsApp
Wrapping up
Whether you are a small business owner or big enterprise in today's evolving business world you have to keep up with everyone. Also, businesses today are more customer driven and you have to be present where your customer is. WhatsApp is one of the most popularly used apps and businesses should leverage it for building a personal connection with them. With the help of WhatsApp bot you can make full use of this at scale and not only in generalized way but in personalized way with the help of advanced GenAI and AI that has come into picture. WhatsApp Chatbot can be and should be one of the major tools for business operating in today's world.
FAQs
To deploy a WhatsApp chatbot, all you need is:
- Verified business on Facebook
- Registered WhatsApp business phone number
- Official WhatsApp Business API
- A free account in Engati
There are certain guidelines one has to follow while sending out messages on WhatsApp, especially when you are doing it on scale with the help of a WhatsApp bot. The message templates are pre-approved templates that have worked before and make it possible for you to announce your promotional campaigns to your customers over WhatsApp, allowing you to drive more conversions, earn more revenue, and gain more value from your chatbot on WhatsApp.
You can use broadcasts to send plain text messages, messages with options, and even take users through paths. We even allow you to schedule your broadcasts and target them to specific segments of your users. To broadcast messages on WhatsApp outside the 24-hour window, you will need to use a template message.
All you have to do is set the templates up directly in the conversation flow while building your WhatsApp AI chatbot by making use of the Template Message node.
WhatsApp distributes its business APIs through its partners. When you create WhatsApp chatbot free on our platform, Engati will help you get access to the WhatsApp API. You can also get your WhatsApp AI number verified in 24 hours.
WhatsApp chatbots are not entirely free, but you can get started without any upfront cost using platforms like Engati. While creating a basic WhatsApp chatbot is free, you may need to pay for additional features, API access, or higher usage volumes. Engati offers a 7 days free trial, allowing you to build and test your WhatsApp chatbot before committing to any paid plans. This makes it easy for businesses of all sizes to explore the benefits of automation without a significant initial investment.
You can segment your existing user lists on the basis of user attributes, but there is an even easier way for you to do that. It is possible for you to set up your WhatsApp chat bot to automatically subscribe your chatbot users to broadcast campaigns on the basis of the actions that they take while interacting with the template messages from your chatbot.
In addition to that, you can also choose to upload a list of users with a certain attribute and send your WhatsApp broadcast campaigns to them.
This allows you to target your users with broadcast messages that actually appeal to their interests, rather than annoying them with irrelevant announcements.
WhatsApp business chatbot plays an important role in an effective omnichannel support strategy because over 2 billion people around the world use WhatsApp. These users open the app an average of 23 to 25 times a day.
Chatbot WhatsApp plays into your broader omnichannel support strategy because your Conversational AI chatbot can also be deployed on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, and 10 other messaging channels.
All your conversations across these channels can be managed in a OneView inbox, allowing your agents to always have context about past conversations on all channels. This means that your customers can continue conversations where they left off when they switch channels, making the experience truly omnichannel. The whole intent is to replicate human conversations.
The WhatsApp Business API is used by medium & large businesses to scale up their customer engagements on WhatsApp with interactive buttons, broadcasts, templates, and other special features that are not available with WhatsApp Business App.
It is used the most by large businesses that have a lot of customers and a business suite that integrates with their other systems, software, and data.
Building a WhatsApp bot is easier than you might think, especially with no-code platforms like Engati. Here’s a quick guide:
- Create a WhatsApp Business Account: Ensure you have a verified WhatsApp Business account.
- Get WhatsApp Business API: You’ll need access to the WhatsApp Business API, which you can obtain through partners like Engati.
- Sign up on Engati: Register on the Engati platform and select the WhatsApp bot option.
- Design Your Bot: Use Engati’s intuitive interface to create conversation flows by simply connecting the dots. No coding is required.
- Test Your Bot: Before going live, test your bot using Engati’s sandbox environment to ensure everything runs smoothly.
- Deploy and Optimize: Once satisfied, deploy your bot and monitor its performance to make ongoing improvements.
Integrating a chatbot with WhatsApp is straightforward with Engati’s platform. Follow these steps:
- Sign Up on Engati: If you don’t have an account yet, sign up on Engati and choose the WhatsApp bot option.
- Connect Your WhatsApp Business Account: Navigate to the “Configure” section on Engati and select WhatsApp as your deployment channel.
- Set Up API Access: Choose a WhatsApp API provider like 360Dialog. Enter your WhatsApp Business phone number and API key in the provided fields.
- Design Your Chatbot: Use Engati’s drag-and-drop builder to create your bot’s conversation flow.
- Test and Deploy: Test your chatbot using Engati’s sandbox. Once ready, deploy it and start engaging with your customers on WhatsApp.
Download our ebook of 285+ Customziable WhatsApp message templates used by the leading Brands, now!
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