If you still doubt WhatsApp's usefulness in customer service, you must be living under a rock. Either you are unaware of its popularity or the advanced Whatsapp version that has better capabilities and is perfectly suitable for customer support.
Feeling overwhelmed? No need!
This article emphasizes the significance and benefits of using WhatsApp for customer service alongside guiding how to use WhatsApp for customer support. and the 5 best WhatsApp customer support software to simplify your business operations.
Let's read-
Nothing else happens in the business game until you get people's attention! And, besides providing brand awareness, WhatsApp adds a lot of tangible value.
How?
WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging app, with over 2 billion users globally. Over the last four years, WhatsApp has added one billion additional users, which means 250 million each year.
With such figures, the popularity and reach of WhatsApp are obvious, and it sets the stage for businesses to target.
According to a WhatsApp report, 50 million businesses use the WhatsApp Business application to speed up customer service by 225%, revenues by 27%, and conversion rates by 20%.
But a couple of statistics are not enough to narrate the tale of WhatsApp’s credibility, here are the 9 benefits of using WhatsApp for Customer Service.
If you are targeting a highly competitive market, the odds of your brand messaging getting lost are high. For your engagement to leave an impact, the communication needs to be direct & consistent.
And, since almost every other person is using WhatsApp, practically every message on WhatsApp attracts the user’s attention and promotes quick connectivity. Businesses take advantage of this by sending messages such as-
Real-time engagement not only reduces response time but also improves marketing efficiency and customer satisfaction. And WhatsApp becomes a wise choice with its evident popularity and functionalities.
According to statistics, 50% of consumers desire order status alerts on WhatsApp, and 43% want information regarding any changes in delivery.
For example,
Colourpop is currently taking up to two business days to respond to incoming high-volume mails, keeping their customers waiting.
While Yoox not only provides real-time customer services via WhatsApp but has also made numerous sales over the platform.
Use product images, quick reply buttons, dynamic CTA buttons, pdf attachments, and explainer videos in WhatsApp marketing campaigns for enhanced interactive conversational experiences with personalized impact.
51% of customers like businesses to anticipate their requirements and give relevant recommendations.
Netflix has been using WhatsApp creatively for conversational marketing since 2017. Netflix's recommendation algorithm proactively sends appropriate suggestions in attractive ways to the viewers directly over Whatsapp.
WhatsApp has no subscription costs and is highly secure owing to its end-to-end encryption feature for message conversation. As a result, whichever medium you use to share your information, the information will stay private between you and the receiver.
Emails are the preferred method of communication in traditional corporate settings, however, we are now in an advanced digital world with faster connectivity. An email has a 56% open rate, and Whatsapp has an open rate of 99%. While email has advantages, WhatsApp emerges as a more effective communication tool in the context of open rates.
WhatsApp for Business offers distinct operational capabilities than WhatsApp's personal version app and leverages better customer support.
WhatsApp Business accelerates sales with its several advanced functionalities like automating messages, marking Contact Labels to organize data productively, in-chat payment, advanced message statistics, and click-to-chat links.
WhatsApp Business drives more customers with its advanced conversational support as research finds that emotional engagement with consumers could drive a 5% uplift in annual revenue. Businesses are also expected to spend up to 3.6 billion US dollars on WhatsApp Business by 2024.
While WhatsApp Business is for solo & small business owners, WhatsApp API is tailored for medium to large businesses. WhatsApp API allows businesses to have multi-user access, a verified green tick, large message volumes, live chatbots, and clickable messages, making WhatsApp API a more powerful tool to provide improved customer experience.
WhatsApp API automates chats, which are expected to recover up to 45% to 60% of abandoned cart drop-offs, and its live chatbots handle customers' inquiries 24x7 as consumers and businesses are estimated to save over 2.5 billion customer service hours by 2023.
WhatsApp has live chat support, as WhatsApp API allows businesses to install chatbots for automated replies and mitigate the high volume of inbound support requests. WhatsApp chatbots for customer service can be used for proactive engagement, providing a personalized experience, and supporting sales around the clock.
Decathlon was able to handle 22% of all queries using WhatsApp Chatbots and reduce average handling time by 50% by using WhatsApp for Customer Service.
WhatsApp API can benefit your business by allowing easy third-party integrations, such as with CRM and social media tools. Such integration will not only promote smooth business operations but will also boost productivity.
WhatsApp for Customer Service unquestionably brings significant value to the business. WhatsApp's unprecedented reach, innovative features, accessibility, simplicity, and WhatsApp versions that cater to various targeted audiences make it the finest solution for customer support and effective engagement.
Many big brands such as Adidas, Netflix, Amazon, Magenta TV, Makro, Pandora, Westside, etc, rely on WhatsApp marketing campaigns to scale their businesses and compelling communication.
To offer streamlined and more productive customer service with the least of efforts through WhatsApp, you’ll need to employ a dedicated WhatsApp customer support software. Here are five of the best WhatsApp customer support software options to choose from depending on your requirements.
Donut.cx is a WhatsApp omnichannel engagement platform that improves customer interaction with minimal friction. Donut.cx sells and supports via chat effortlessly, thanks to its unified inbox that consolidates all of your customer interactions and allows you to automate responses for superior business operations.
Donut's comprehensive services eliminate the need for multiple tools to provide reliable and robust customer service for a better consumer experience.
Donut.cx allows you to access various channels and chats via one inbox, i.e., your WhatsApp Inbox. You can provide immediate & more personal service to your customers with a single view and by navigating to different tools and platforms with a single click from a single inbox.
Donut.cx helps you to acquire instant customer context at the correct time with a Centralized Customer database that collaborates internally and easily resolves queries for better responsive services.
A customer database not only improves the effectiveness of the interaction but also provides the consumer with a better experience, which increases goodwill.
Donut.cx enables you to automate simple operations such as responding to frequent inquiries, assigning incoming chats, routing, and so on to reduce workload and maintain a fast workflow.
With Donut.cx, one may segregate tasks and create groups accordingly to simplify business processes. To boost operational efficiency, Donut.cx also lets you add labels to incoming chats, track your team's performance, and keep track of your total chat volume and CSAT rating.
Order monitoring is typically perceived as a hard and time-consuming task for every e-commerce business. However, Donut.cx allows you to generate orders and process payments directly from the centralized inbox.
Donut.cx provides access to the order management widget, which allows you to browse catalogs, create orders, and process payments using links from the Inbox.
Donut.cx is presently only available as a web-based application; it does not work on iOS or Android devices.
Heyday is an AI conversational multi-channel messaging platform that converts conversations into sales opportunities around the clock from a single inbox. Heyday by Hootsuite enables organizations to tailor customer experiences at scale and provide five-star customer experiences.
Heyday integrates smoothly with popular apps like Instagram, Facebook, Salesforce, Shopify, Magento, Google Business messages, and many more.
With Heyday, you can guide customers from the arrival through the checkout with an AI-powered product search that captures their intent and preferences to produce personalized product recommendations that convert.
Heyday’s deep integrations enable your team to share personalized recommendations and let customers search the product catalog directly from within the chat.
With Heyday's proactive messaging, you can keep consumers informed at all times with automated shipment notifications while relieving your team of order-tracking-related questions.
Heyday’s chatbots allow efficient interactions with customers whenever they need you. However, because no one knows your business better than your team, Heyday lets conversations flow easily from AI to your team, in case of expertise.
Heyday allows you to speed up your responses with personalized templates and minimize team workloads with automated FAQs that answer up to 80% of inquiries.
Some Heyday users defer its perplexing dashboard, which complicates the process. They wish the dashboard to be more user-friendly.
You must have your contacts to set up a centralized WhatsApp Inbox, however, Heyday’s reviews consist of a complaint regarding the difficulty in finding contacts and not being able to open stories.
Front, a customer communication platform strengthens customer relationships via a centralized inbox that facilitates a 360° view of all customer information. With Front’s intuitive workflows and routing, you can grow your business, control your costs, and utilize WhatsApp for customer service and engagement at the best.
As Front says, “Give your browsers Tab a break”. With Front's centralized inbox, you can handle multiple communication channels from a single location, and your team can swiftly and easily streamline customer service operations with automated workflows.
Front gives you in-depth information about your team's performance, conversations, SLAs, and customer experience. One may utilize this data and implement the strategy with built-in collaboration tools to improve customer relationships and operational efficiency.
Front consolidates customer information in native form and previous conversations to meet future context needs to keep in sync and provide thoughtful support without wasting any time.
Front facilitates improved features for better customer service such as calendar and one-click meeting scheduling, CRM integration, advanced analytics, onboarding & solution design, change management, and security compliances.
With Front's unified inbox, you can manage all your work in one single view whether it’s email, your company Twitter, your favorite apps, or team chat, you can manage it all in Front. With greater visibility, Front's single-view capability keeps you organized and actionable.
Front has a few of the most amazing email templates which means no more typing out long emails and saving time while still being consistent with answers and responses.
Some of Front’s users prefer the web-app version over the desktop app because the web-app version offers all tools in one browser window and keyboard shortcuts, which is more convenient.
Some of Front's users believe the lower tier pricing is reasonable, but in the rest of the cases, the price skyrockets, putting most small businesses out of reach. The biggest con reported to Front is the limits they set on the "affordable" plan.
Wati facilitates customer engagement by providing a shared team inbox, automated responses, private notes, data tagging, and analytics to support the work management of the support, sales, marketing, and developer teams, and have distinct demos for each team.
Wati supports extensive native integrations with leading tools such as Shopify, Zapier, Hubspot, Pabbly, Zoho CRM, Integromat, and others.
You can manage customer service using Wati's shared team inbox and assign conversations to agents, respond quickly with automated template messages, collaborate with private notes, and use a no-code chatbot for customer service.
Wati improves your customers' experiences by providing personalized offers, product recommendations based on the purchaser's activity, and personalized messaging and post-order notifications that increase rapport and repeat business.
Wati improves customer support by unifying client engagement with contextual conversations and personalized marketing, which improves your CSAT scores and puts you in a stronger position when utilizing WhatsApp for customer service.
The Wati team customizes every demo as per your company size, desired language, and what you hope to learn from the demo.
Wati allows you to start a discussion with your lead as soon as they sign up and deploy customized WhatsApp campaigns to your prospects in bulk.
Few Wati users reported Wati’s dashboard to be a little hard to grasp and was hampered by a few bugs here and there.
Wati has limited pricing options because its pricing model only includes two pricing plans, Standard and Professional. Most productivity apps include at least three to four pricing options.
Wati's pricing plan is not very flexible and does not cater to all business sizes, particularly for a single user or personal use.
Interakt provides end-to-end Whatsapp business solutions with a shared team inbox consisting of an advanced chat widget. Interakt aids in bringing higher conversions via WhatsApp storefronts with seamless business integrations, automated chat flow, workflow, and notifications.
Interakt makes it easy to share product catalogs with thousands of opted-in clients on WhatsApp and convert the sales opportunity with automatic notification campaigns and personalized auto-replies.
Interakt can let you send Bulk Campaigns and Broadcasts to engage with your consumers and sell more. Interakt also tracks campaign performance and your agents' responses to optimize your customer experience.
Interakt provides real-time team collaboration through conversation labels and private notes, as well as assigning and re-assigning chats to experts for improved customer experience and boosting team efforts and collaborations.
Interakt assists you in applying for the Green tick alongside your brand name on WhatsApp to help you gain credibility.
Interakt anonymizes client phone numbers to secure their identities and prevent the misuse of critical data.
Intekart supports easy automation to manage customer services by setting automated alerts for COD confirmations, shipping updates, abandoned carts, discount offers, and custom replies for FAQs.
One of the disadvantages consumers encountered when utilizing Interakt for customer service was the need for direct integration options. Currently, Interakt does not have an Integration with popular apps such as Facebook and Instagram, which is also counted as a drawback.
Unlike the online app version, the Interakt mobile app has few glitches and restricted functionality, which users believe the Interakt team might improve on.
Respond.io supports marketing, sales & supports campaigns via its unified custom inboxes. Respond.io also uses automated messaging, data enrichment services, and qualification logic to execute sales qualification.
Respond.io generates cross-channel audiences with targeted instant messaging drip campaigns and personalizes inbound engagements. Respond.io also uses Chat Menus to provide a high-quality customer experience with automated replies for abandoned carts, new sign-ups, and lead magnet catches.
By pre-built automated Workflows accessible via clickable buttons placed in the chat widget, agents can submit orders, create tickets, handle refunds, conduct shift transfers, support escalations, and more.
Respond.io helps agents by converting routine tasks into Workflows using Action Shortcuts as triggers via shift changes and support escalations.
Respond.io is a multi-channel platform that gives you access to all of the major channels, including WhatsApp, Twitter, Telegram, Instagram, WordPress, Digiflow, and others.
Respond.io integrates with popular apps including Zapier, Make.com, Zendesk, Salesforce, Slack, Hubspot, Webhook, and Google Sheets.
Respond.io enables detailed analytics that allow you to acquire long-term perspectives on your team's and overall messaging performance.
Few Respond.io users believed that the first-time contact plan was limited and that any changes to the plan for new Monthly Active Contacts impacted the cost structure. Users expect Respond.io to autodelete inactive contacts after a certain period of time or archive them.
Respond.io users have stated that the mobile version is sluggish and fails to display notifications on time.
WhatsApp for customer service not only adds significant value with its extensive reach and improved functionality, but it also streamlines the process awarding more results & convenience.
The prospect of automation and integration with WhatsApp tells a distinct story, emphasizing WhatsApp's utility.
With just one WhatsApp Customer Support software, your process of using WhatsApp for customer service will become more simplistic & effective. And the criteria for selecting WhatsApp software should be based on your requirement and the effectiveness of the software.
If providing customer services concerns you, try WhatsApp, backed by Customer Support Software; the solution will last forever.
Donut.cx effortlessly supports contextual customer services and marketing campaigns when it comes to driving conversions from conversations. To get started,
Enhance customer loyalty with Donut.cx
A Donut specialist will reach out to you to schedule a personalised demo. In the meanwhile watch the demo to know more about Donut’s capabilities
Watch Demo
