In today's multi-touchpoint world, managing the customer journey can be challenging. Prior to making a purchase, customers wander between channels looking for assurance. And this assurance can only be provided if your business is quick enough to respond to customer queries.
Now, think about where the majority of your customer inquiries arrive. Safe to say your social channels, correct? And if your clients prefer to communicate with you via WhatsApp, this post is for you. From handling customer queries to showcasing products, or sending notifications, you can do it all on WhatsApp and enhance your customer experience.
In this article, we dig deeper into how you can make your customer service efficient through WhatsApp.
Why Deliver Customer Support via WhatsApp?
Beyond real-time communication with customers, WhatsApp Business API has a lot more to offer:
Preferred channel by customers: Any consumer will be frustrated if they have to go to your website, hunt down a contact form, submit their inquiry, and then wait for what seems like an eternity for a response.
Now picture them pulling out their phone, doing a quick search for your company on WhatsApp, and sending you their question. WhatsApp doesn't take forever to load and people around the globe use it on a regular basis.
Source: Quickdialog
To put it in numbers, over two-third of WhatsApp users are of the view that the platform builds a personal relationship with businesses while 68% of users say WhatsApp is the most convenient way to reach out to a brand.
In a nutshell, using WhatsApp will earn you repeat business as well as positive word-of-mouth.
Highest number of monthly active users: Among messaging apps, WhatsApp has the most monthly active users across all age categories and geographies. According to Facebook, over 100 billion messages are sent, and over two billion minutes are spent on voice and video calls on WhatsApp each day.
Businesses of all kinds, and e-commerce stores in particular, can benefit greatly from this volume of traffic since it provides ample opportunity to promote your products, attract new customers, engage existing ones, and ultimately increase sales.
Multiple message formats: WhatsApp allows you to send text, photos, videos, and even PDFs. That encompasses all main communication formats.
Additionally, the software supports both voice and video calls. If you need to explain something quickly over the phone, your agents can do it directly within the application.
Want to provide a shipping update? Shoot a text message.
Want to send out the menu of your cafe or a catalog of your designs? Use PDF.
Have a future event? Videotape the launch announcement.
Need to describe a complicated procedure? Send photographs and screenshots.
Take for instance, Hellmann's Whatscook event. Customers could use WhatsApp to communicate with a chef. Besides, through the app's multimedia features, users would share images of the items they had on hand, and the chef would walk them through a dish. From pre-sales to post-sales, WhatsApp’s multimedia features can come in handy as a customer support tool.
Ease of integration with other channels: Multiple customer care channels might be challenging for your team if you don’t have a holistic system in place.
And here’s the charm of WhatsApp. You can integrate third-party applications with WhatsApp in order to display incoming messages in a single inbox, allocate tickets to support agents, and sort and filter incoming messages.
How To Utilize WhatsApp for Efficient Customer Support
1. Pre-set responses
WhatsApp lets you create predetermined messages to answer some of your customers’ FAQs. Apart from welcome and away messages, you can generate message templates of any kind for rapid customer support. Next, simply press “/” to select a quick reply and send.
This simple feature saves you a tremendous amount of time and allows your customer support team to focus on more critical concerns.
2. Chatbot capabilities
Using WhatsApp, you may configure a chatbot to automatically answer common inquiries. This not only enables you to give help around the clock, but it also frees up customer service representatives to answer more complex inquiries.
In addition, there are many different ways to use chatbots for WhatsApp for your business:
Product display: Customers typically steer clear of purchasing unfamiliar things. Therefore, ensuring that the products are visible to customers must be your top priority.
A WhatsApp chatbot can be a fantastic tool for getting customers' attention on their preferred channel and showcasing your goods to them directly.
Lead qualification: A WhatsApp Chatbot can assist in automating the qualification of leads. Therefore, you can cultivate leads by collecting important user attributes.
And the bot makes it easier to capture useful information like age, gender, email, etc. And when user attributes are accessible and automation is possible, qualifying leads is a breeze.
Personalized recommendation: A chatbot can gather user analytics and then make relevant offers based on the data like browsing history, previous purchases, etc.
As a matter of fact, WhatsApp integration for customer engagement can help grow your brand manifold. For instance, by using MyAlice bot, you can speed up response times and guarantee that clients receive contextual responses at every point of their journey.
3. Post-purchase support
Consider that you sell purifiers. After a consumer has purchased your product, you might notify them when it is time to clean or replace their purifiers.
In addition, you can provide personalized recommendations for potential upsell and cross-sell opportunities by analyzing their purchase history. You can sell replacement parts to these clients, for instance.
However, obtain client permission (commonly known as "opt-in") prior to sending them advertising messages. You can accomplish this by asking each individual buyer during the initial chat.
4. Collect Feedback
Feedback collection is one of the most critical functions of customer service. This helps to demonstrate that you value your customers’ input which further strengthens your brand image.
However, collecting comments and reviews is difficult. After making a purchase, the majority of customers will not check emails requesting feedback. And just a small percentage of those who do will click over to your site to leave feedback.
In this regard, you can easily form WhatsApp groups to distribute CSAT surveys and calculate your NPS. Simply create a review request template message via WhatsApp and send it over to hundreds of people.
Your customers will always respond faster to WhatsApp chats since they are instantaneous, as opposed to emails, for which they must wait several days.
Build A More Effective WhatsApp Presence With MyAlice
In one single dashboard, MyAlice merges WhatsApp messaging with other customer facing channels. As such, you can get a comprehensive understanding of your customer, enabling you to act swiftly and precisely while providing a personalized experience.
With MyAlice’s AI-powered Whatsapp bot, you can automate up to 60 percent of consumer inquiries. That's a significant amount of time saved for your customer support staff, and a large number of clients obtaining immediate assistance. Besides, by tracking data along the marketing funnel, MyAlice enables you to recommend products and send customized messages to your customers.
Last but not the least, teams may coordinate and assign queries to the appropriate parties, ensuring that the client receives the best response straight away.
You can Start a free trial of the chatbot and see its potential with respect to WhatsApp engagement.
Final Words
Given the advantages of messaging through WhatsApp for both customers and businesses, it's no surprise that the platform is rapidly growing in popularity.
So, without further ado, make sure your WhatsApp number is prominently displayed on your website, contact pages, and social media so that your customers can easily find it and contact you.
Do you find yourself chasing down new customers because current customers aren't sticking around, and you need to keep your eCommerce business afloat? Is it a sustainable strategy to run your eCommerce business?
We hear you saying no because it actually isn't. It's time you need to focus on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
In this competitive narrative, you can't really go far by keeping on investing in getting NEW customers rather than keeping your OLD customers. What you really need to concentrate on is maximizing your revenue from your present customers. And this is where customer lifetime value comes into play.
According to Tim Cameron Kitchen- CEO of Exposure Ninja, "In order to increase your customer lifetime value, you need to pull two levers. One, increase the number of purchases. And two, increase the purchase value of each customer. And of course, a good business will have a combination of both of these levers."
We want your business to have high customer LTV. So we noted down a series of pointers that you could follow to increase your customer lifetime value and higher profits. Before we dive into the strategies, let's start with the basics.
What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?
According to Omniconvert, "customer lifetime value (CLV) shows how much revenue a business can expect from one customer compared to how long the company predicts that customer will stay."
Customer lifetime value is an important metric for eCommerce brands to measure the average accumulating total of their purchase for some time.
Lifetime value helps you determine if your business will scale the ROI from marketing. It also helps you evaluate the retention strategy depending on how low or high your LTV is.
How To Increase Customer Lifetime Value
You can increase your customer lifetime value by either increasing your Average Order Value or Average Purchase Frequency. An increase in either of these metrics will rise Customer Lifetime Value. Apart from that, let's take a look at the other ways to increase CLV.
— Improve Your Customer Support
Treating your customer right is the core to increasing customer lifetime value. According to Tim Han, an international speaker and author from success insider - "treating your customers like family is the key to recurring customers."
Now we're not telling you to turn a blind eye to their red flags and keep on supporting them. But we definitely recommend you to go a bit above to give them special treatments. In fact, according to research from PWC, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. So enhancing your customer support is an absolute must.
A solid customer support strategy includes attention to the customer pre, mid and post-sale. Your customer support should cater to your customer at every stage of their buying journey. A great way to make sure your customer's queries are always answered in no time is by using an AI-powered chatbot. Having a live chat available can turn a customer question into a sale or complaint into a resolution. We recommend you check out MyAlice as their chatbot can actually automate your entire selling process from start to finish. And the best part is, MyAlice is completely free to sign up!
You need to make sure your customers are returning again and again for the delightful experience you provide.
— Send out occasional gifts
Who doesn't like free stuff? Especially when it comes as a surprise from a place you shopped from. We find ourselves leaning towards shops that offer great discounts or free goodies in most cases. And that's because this is a psychological trick that all of us fall for.
Lippincott's creative consultancy provided a scientific and psychological-based study called the "Happiness Halo" - proving exactly that. In the "Happiness Halo," the author stresses, "Appeal to customers' reason and they're yours for a day. Appeal to customer's emotions, and they're yours for a lifetime."
And nothing is more solid than sending gifts to appeal to your customer's emotions. It shows them that you care about them more than just a means of getting some sales.
We're not telling you to send out gifts 365 days a year to every customer for every purchase. But rather, identify your loyal set of customers and potentially loyal customers, and then send out occasional gifts to show them you care.
— Nudge Your Customers into Subscriptions
One of the most popular ways (that works) of increasing the number of purchases of your customers is by bumping them into subscriptions. They're one of the new trends of e-commerce. And they can be lucrative enough that we even see big names like GoPro getting into the subscription realm they previously didn't opt for.
You can nudge them into a subscription by displaying a subscription-biased pricing option of your product.
This basically means you will show the pricing option of a one-time purchase on one side. And on another, the pricing option is based on subscription. However, you need to show your customers how the subscription pricing will be more effective and profitable.
This will incentivize them to opt for the subscription rather than going for a one-time purchase.
Another way of getting your customers into subscriptions is by showing the subscription as the default purchase method. And if customers want to go for a one-time purchase, they need to click on that purchase method.
You can do to level up the subscription game by giving them an option to allow your customers to customize the time frame and the amount of product for the subscription. This way, they will not have too much stock of the product based on their lifestyle. And they are less likely to cancel the subscription altogether.
— Integrate Add-ons and Upsells
Another great way to increase the average order value of your customers is by adding add-ons and upsells. Big names like GoDaddy GoPro have been using this pricing strategy for years now, which has helped them generate more sales.
Everything that you throw at your customers before and after purchasing the products is for one thing - increasing the order value.
And therefore, there's an increase in customer LTV. Some of your add-ons and upsells features may seem annoying to your customers. But it's a genius idea for your business.
Since you are competing in a very competitive and price-sensitive space, If you want to maximize your customer acquisition, you need to maximize the value of every customer you get through the door.
By doing so, you can save the money that you would have otherwise spent on getting new customers. So you can now invest it in other business activities. Like - marketing. Which will help you build market share without increasing the price of their core product.
— Introduce Premium Versions
Introducing a line of premium versions of the same product can incentivize your customers to opt for better options. But, you need to make sure you can present it in a manner that demonstrates why the premium versions are better than the regular ones.
That way, customers who always want the best of everything are more likely to opt for the premium purchase. The pricing of the premium product will also be higher than the regular, which may be a problem for some of your customers. In such a case, you can introduce split pay for that.
Now split pay is absolutely everywhere and another massive trend of e-commerce over the last few years. One of the biggest players in the split pay market -Klarna, claims to increase the average order value by up to 58%.
Split pay will help you get more sales for your premium products and end up increasing the average order value for your customers.
Drawing Conclusion: Loyalty Brings Revenue
The right customer lifetime value model can boost your company's growth and progress in many ways. It puts more money in your business's wallet by lowering customer acquisition costs and saving money on marketing and sales activities.
Delivering a great deal of value, understanding the customers being in their shoes, prioritizing customer service are what they need to come back to you again and again.
