Since you’re here, it means that you have understood that you need to engage your customers over the channel they are most comfortable using. Kudos to you!
You know that your customers are rather active over WhatsApp. Now, you have three questions on your mind.
Well, we’ve got all the answers you are looking for.
We’re going to help you decide whether you need a WhatsApp chatbot for business, then show you exactly how to create it, and walk you through all the steps involved in deploying it on WhatsApp in just 5 minutes. Grab on to your seats. We’re getting started!
What is WhatsApp chatbot?
A WhatsApp chatbot is an automated software that uses Artificial Intelligence or pre-programmed rules to engage with your customers on WhatsApp.
Engati's WhatsApp chatbots use AI and our proprietary NLP (Natural Language Processing) 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, etc.
WhatsApp business 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 create your own WhatsApp chatbot?
If you have a very small clientele, you might be able to survive by manually responding to each message. But as your business grows, that 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.
If you’re into eCommerce or retail, that puts you in a more challenging position. 53% of online shoppers abandon their carts for lack of instant answers.
So, if you’re interested in having satisfied customers and protecting your carts from abandonment, you should create WhatsApp chatbot for your business.
How to create a WhatsApp chatbot?
Here are the steps to build WhatsApp chatbot in 2023:
Step 1: Picking the right platform
When it comes to creating a chatbot, you’ve got two choices.
- Code it
- Use a powerful, no-code chatbot platform (hint, this is the better choice)
Building it with a no-code chatbot platform like Engati is the wiser choice. After all, why would you make the effort to painstakingly code a chatbot when you can build your WhatsApp chatbot visually?
We can help you get your bot up & running and start delighting your customers much faster than if you chose to code it yourself.
We have ready-to-implement chatbots available for all industries & use cases - which reduces your go-to-market time.
Step 2: Pre-requisites for deploying chatbots on WhatsApp
- First, you need to have access to WhatsApp Business API. WhatsApp grants access to these APIs themselves through their partners.
- To receive WhatsApp bot API access, you’ll also need a verified business on Facebook.
- You also need to register a phone number as your WhatsApp Business phone number
- WhatsApp will call this number up to confirm and activate it for your WhatsApp Business Account, so you need to make sure that the number can receive calls from the USA.
Step 3: Setup and connect your WhatsApp Business account on Engati
In the Engati portal, navigate to the Deploy tab and select WhatsApp. Now you’d want to choose your provider from the drop-down menu. To set up your WhatsApp bot in the fastest way possible, 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, you’re going to have to update a couple of fields:
- Phone Number
- API key
Step 4: Configure WhatsApp
Add your WhatsApp Business number in the phone number field.
For generating your API key, reach out to our team and we'll help you get it in 2 mins.
If you're following these steps to create your chatbot right now, then we request you to quickly fill this form and we'll get back to you with the process of generating the API key.
Save the changes once you've added your mobile number & the API key.
Step 5: Test your WhatsApp chatbot
Now that you’ve entered all your details, you’re ready to test your WhatsApp chatbot.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’ve learned how to make your WhatsApp bot. Now, the question in your mind is, ‘Can I integrate my WhatsApp bot into my website?’
Once you complete all the steps, you'll be able to access the HTML code that you can add to your website and create your WhatsApp widget for free.
Along with this, you'll also get your WhatsApp QR code and Click-to-chat WhatsApp link for sharing it ahead.
Examples of powerful WhatsApp chatbots
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 an intelligent chatbot operating in English and Hindi over WhatsApp & Telegram.
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 bot 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
- iMile
- Dubai Properties (Website) and WhatsApp
- Dubai Asset Management, (WhatsApp)
- GMR Aerocity Website & WhatsApp
- Danube Properties - WhatsApp
FAQs
To deploy a chatbot on WhatsApp Messenger, all you need is:
1. Verified business on Facebook
2. Registered WhatsApp business phone number
3. Official WhatsApp Business API (which Engati helps you get)
The message templates 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 WhatsApp chatbot.
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.
The good news is that you don’t need to go to the 360Dialog portal and create new broadcasts from there every time you want to send a template message.
All you’d have to do is set the templates up directly in the conversation flow while building your WhatsApp API chatbot by making use of the Template Message node.
WhatsApp distributes its business APIs through its partners. When you create a WhatsApp bot on our platform, Engati will help you get access to the API.
WhatsApp Marketing is thriving and you must leverage the power of reaching out to your customers via WhatsApp. So, while it is not free to deploy a chatbot, through our partnerships with WhatsApp API providers, we can help you do that at a competitive price.
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 chatbot 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 broadcast message 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 chatbots play 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.
It ideally plays into your broader omnichannel support strategy because the bot you deploy on WhatsApp 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.
Download our ebook of 70 WhatsApp message templates used by the leading eCommerce Brands now!
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