All posts by Shivam Verma

Shivam Verma, Co-Founder and CTO at Chat360, is a seasoned technology leader, boasting a wealth of experience in product development, architecture, design, data engineering, reporting systems, and team building. Armed with a Bachelor's in Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur, Shivam is dedicated to driving technological innovation and excellence. His journey is marked by a profound passion for crafting exceptional products and tackling real-world challenges through advanced technology and superior software engineering practices. At Chat360, Shivam has played a pivotal role in providing AI-Powered Tech solutions to industry leaders in the B2B domain, onboarding renowned clients both in India and overseas, solidifying the company's footprint in the global landscape. Shivam's expertise extends to the realms of Generative AI and Conversational AI. Under his leadership, Chat360 has developed and evolved an AI-powered SaaS product that empowers enterprises worldwide to generate digital revenue more efficiently, significantly reducing the Cost Per Lead and maximizing conversion rate. Beyond technical proficiency, Shivam is recognized for his exceptional leadership skills. He actively engages in training and mentoring new and existing team members, infusing an analytical and logical approach to design tailor made products that meet the unique needs of diverse industries. His ability to provide optimistic solutions reflects a commitment to driving success in the technology domain. Shivam stands as a driving force in the technological landscape, leading Chat360 to new heights with a focus on cutting-edge solutions, client satisfaction, and team development.

WhatsApp Open API

API, or Application Programming Interfaces, have become a crucial element of the latest technology and software development. API allows different applications and services to communicate and exchange data seamlessly. In this blog, we will discuss about WhatsApp Open API, a powerful application for building AI WA chatbots. We will cover the basics of WhatsApp Open API, its benefits, availability to end-user, and the other kind of APIs that are available. Whether you are a tech-savvy person or completely new to the world of APIs, this blog post will provide everything that you need.

What is WhatsApp open API?

WhatsApp Open API is technically a free API developed by Meta (the parent company of WhatsApp). This allows businesses to interact with their customers through the WhatsApp messaging platform with advanced capabilities at free of cost. Sometimes, this is also termed as WhatsApp public API or WhatsApp free API.

The WA open API also provides a way for businesses to build custom integrations and automate conversations with customers. Making it easier to provide customer support, send notifications, and more. WhatsApp Open API includes features such as message templates, session management, transaction categorizing, message scheduling, and many more. It has been designed to be simple to use and scalable for businesses of all sizes.

Related: WhatsApp Bot Features Guide

Benefits of WhatsApp open API

WhatsApp Open APIs provide a standard way for different systems and applications to interact with each other. Some benefits of these include:

  1. Freely available: The best part of using WhatsApp open API would be using it at free of cost. 
  2. Universally accessible: WahstApp public APIs make it easier for developers to access data and services from across the globe. This creates a faster and more efficient work environment.
  3. Works seamlessly: WhatsApp open APIs promote smooth workflows between systems. This allows them to work together seamlessly and reduces the manual efforts for reviewing tasks.
  4. Swift development: WA Open APIs provide a simplified way to access data and services, enabling devs to create new apps and services swifter.
  5. Enhanced user experience: WhatsApp open APIs allow technicians to build better user experiences by making the integration part compatible with multiple platforms.
  6. Technical advancement: This encourages collaboration and innovation, as tech folks can build and scale innovative products and services.
  7. Provides more functions: With WhatsApp open APIs, you get more functions as there are multi-integration capabilities available on the platform.

Is WhatsApp open API available to end-user?

Currently, WhatsApp open API is not available to end-user. The API that is issued by Meta is in two forms: Cloud API and Business API. This is chargeable based on the needs and type of a business operation because Meta doesn’t allow gambling, adult content, and alcohol businesses to promote using this platform.

Some of the reasons why Meta isn’t making the API public is because:

  1. It prevents companies from misusing the application to spam end-users without authorization. Spamming is the last thing that WhatsApp users expect. They will start migrating to other platforms if it happens.
  2. Meta wants to create a regulated environment in which they can decide and control the kinds of messages that can be reached out to the audience.
  3. Policy restrictions also prevent Meta from giving out API to the public because this can make all kinds of businesses to promote on WhatsApp without any restriction.

Scaling WhatsApp Business APIs through AI Chatbots

WhatsApp Business APIs or WhatsApp Cloud APIs play a crucial role in building WhatsApp chatbots for businesses to interact with their target audience. APIs allow WhatsApp chatbots to access data from various sources and perform various actions, such as sending messages, retrieving information, and processing payments.

The technology behind AI chatbots is natural language processing (NLP). This allows chatbots to understand and respond to human language. Making it easier for users to interact with chatbots and get the information they need with the help of APIs. It can also be used to integrate chatbots with other systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) tools and e-commerce platforms. This allows AI chatbots to provide a more comprehensive and personalized experience for the target audience.

Through WhatsApp APIs for chatbots, you have complete power to scale. As chatbots are involved in multiple business workflows, the number of users and interactions will increase. WhatsApp APIs help to ensure that chatbots can handle any kind of demand and query raised by the customer. 

How can companies use WhatsApp Business or Cloud API?

The Importance of WhatsApp Business or Cloud API for businesses lies in its ability to enhance customer engagement and support, streamline marketing and promotional efforts, and improve operational efficiency.

Customer Engagement and Support 

WhatsApp Business API allows businesses to communicate with customers directly through WhatsApp, offering a more personalized and convenient experience. This can result in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Marketing and Promotions 

The WA API allows businesses to send targeted promotions and marketing messages to their customers through WhatsApp, resulting in a higher engagement rate and conversion rate.

Operational Efficiency 

The WhatsApp API enables businesses to automate many routine tasks, such as sending order updates and delivery tracking information, freeing up time for more critical tasks and improving overall efficiency.

Data Insights and Analysis 

The WhatsApp Cloud API also gives businesses valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, allowing them to make informed decisions and improve their operations.

Summing it up

In conclusion, WhatsApp open APIs are not available for end-user. But with the help of WhatsApp Business API or WhatsApp cloud API, they provide a range of capabilities. These are critical for AI chatbots to operate efficiently and provide real benefits for customers. Chat360 provides a complete no-code chatbot builder platform for all levels of businesses. You can try it for yourself and see the results.

Further, read: How to add bot in WhatsApp group?

WhatsApp Business Web

Connecting with customers, managing conversations, and automating customer support all in one place is the need of the hour. Thanks to the WhatsApp Business web app, you can say goodbye to constantly switching between your phone and computer and hello to a more efficient platform. The WA web app is easy to use, secure, and completely hassle-free, making it the ideal choice for any business looking to connect with customers and improve customer experience. In this article, we’ll discuss how to use the WhatsApp Business Web App for PC or laptop to maximize your business communication.

What is WhatsApp business web?

WhatsApp Business Web App for PC or laptop is a tool designed for small to large companies. This is available for Windows and Mac OS. It is introduced for communication between businesses and customers using the popular messaging app WhatsApp. The app’s web version allows users to access all the features of WhatsApp Business from their computer. Making it easier to manage your customer interactions, automate responses, and keep track of all your customer chats. 

By using this app, companies can strengthen their customer service and support. They can also automate most of the business workflows using the WhatsApp chatbot. With its seamless integration with WhatsApp on the phone, companies can stay connected with their customers even when they are away from their devices. Overall, WA Web is an efficient and cost-effective way for businesses to stay constantly connected with their customers.

Related: Check out WhatsApp Chatbot Features

How to set up WhatsApp Business Web App

You’ll need to have a WhatsApp Business account to get started with this web app. If you don’t have one already, you can sign up for free from the website. Once you have an account, you can start using the app by downloading the relevant app for your device from Windows or MacOS. Here are the steps:

  1. You need to visit the official WhatsApp Business Web download page.
  2. Determine which file you want to download depending on your OS.
  3. Download the .dmg or .exe file and extract it.
  4. Select the source folder where the files have to be installed.

Note: If you are using a different OS apart from Windows or MacOS, you can use the WhatsApp Web App through your browser.

How to use WhatsApp Business Account

Logging in to WhatsApp web

  1. You’ll need to use a QR code to connect your WhatsApp Business account to the web app. 
  2. Using the WhatsApp Business app, you can generate a QR code from your smartphone. 
  3. Go to the “Settings” menu in the app, then tap “WhatsApp Web.” 
  4. You’ll then see a QR code that you can scan using your phone’s camera. 
  5. Once you’ve scanned the code, you’ll be logged into the web app and can start using it to manage your customer interactions.

Note: Depending upon the version of your device, you need to grant permission using the PIN, Face/Touch ID, or biometric authentication.

Logging out from WhatsApp web

  1. You can log out from your phone or desktop device in simple steps.
  2. Open WhatsApp from your phone. 
  3. If you are using an iPhone, go to “WhatsApp settings” and tap “linked devices.” For Android users, find the “more options” button and then click “linked devices.” 
  4. Next, you need to find the device that you want to log out of and click “log out.” 
  5. You will be signed out of the WA web app.

What to do when you’re unable to connect WA web app?

There is no reason to panic when you are unable to connect WhatsApp web app. Here are the following solutions to fix it:

Check internet data connection: Whether you have connected through WiFi, data provider, or ethernet cable, make sure that your computer has a stable internet connection.

QR Code Scanner: Check whether the QR code on your computer screen is being appropriately scanned by your phone’s camera. Try wiping the lens or screen display for better visibility.

Log out and Log in: A simple solution that does wonders. Try logging out of WhatsApp Web and then logging in again.

Clear cache and cookies: Clearing cache and cookies from your browser can help resolve any temporary issues. You need to visit your browser’s settings section and then find Cookies. You can then clear by checking what all items need to be removed.

Disable VPN: If you are using a VPN, try disabling it and see if it fixes the issue.

Restart your device: Sometimes, a simple restart of your computer or mobile phone can resolve any technical issues.

Upgrade WhatsApp: Check whether you have the latest version of WhatsApp installed on your phone and your computer. You can do this by visiting the app store from your device or checking the about section in the settings of your web app.

If these steps do not resolve the issue, you can reach out to WhatsApp Support for further assistance.

Why do you need to use WhatsApp Business Web App

The platform provides you with several features to help you manage your customer interactions. Here are some of the most useful ones:

Chat Management

With the chat management feature, you can keep track of all your customer interactions in one place. You can see a list of all your chats, reply to messages, and even send quick replies to frequently asked questions.

Automated Responses

The automated responses feature allows you to create pre-written responses that can be sent automatically to your customers. This is especially useful for handling common customer queries, such as business hours or delivery times. You can set up automated responses in the “Settings” menu in the web app.

Short Link

The short link feature allows you to create a link that customers can use to start a chat with you. You can use the link on your website, emails, or social media to make it easier for customers to reach you.

Streamlining Business Communications

One of the most significant advantages of using the WhatsApp Business Web App is that it streamlines all of your business communications into one convenient location. Whether you are receiving messages from customers, communicating with your team, or reaching out to potential clients, the app makes it easy to manage all of these interactions from one place.

Improved Customer Experience

Using WhatsApp Business Web App can also significantly improve the customer experience. With the app, you can easily respond to customer inquiries, resolve issues, and provide support in real time. This level of responsiveness and convenience can help build trust and increase customer satisfaction, leading to long-term customer loyalty.

Related: How to add bot to WhatsApp group?

Conclusion

WhatsApp Business Web App is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. Its chat management, automated responses, and short link features make it easier to communicate with your customers and keep track of all your interactions. Whether you’re a small business owner or a large corporation, it is a must-have tool for maximizing customer satisfaction and improving business communication.

Suggested reading:

How to Use Your Phone Number to Login WhatsApp Web?

WhatsApp vs WhatsApp Beta

Enhance Your Shopping Experience with Our Chatbot Assistant

Online shopping is all the rage today. Earlier, when only the ones who could afford it had their online storefronts set up, almost every brick-and-mortar shop in 2023 had gone digital. Shopping online is becoming a norm. In fact, the global e-commerce revenue will reach $58.74 trillion by 2028.

With numbers that staggering, it’s safe to assume that digital commerce is only booming by the hour. 

So, how can businesses catch on to the rising demand? Convert users and provide efficient customer support simultaneously? By automating tasks with a shopping assistant chatbot!

What is a shopping assistant chatbot?

A shopping assistant chatbot is an AI-led chatbot solution that attends to users and interacts with them with responses and answers they need. Did you know that almost 50% of online shoppers use a chatbot to make a purchase? This comes as no surprise.

Shopping Assistant Chatbots

Shopping assistant chatbots can help users make better buying decisions by interjecting at the right moment to ensure higher conversions. These shopping assistant chatbots also help your customers find solutions to issues they face post-sales.

For example, when a customer is in the speculative stage and isn’t sure about, say, the return and exchange policy on a garment, the shopping chatbot can quickly clarify the rules. This can push the customer to convert right when the on-demand chatbot answers the query.

In a post-sales case, the user now wants to return the garment because of a size issue. Again, the chatbot can engage the user and process the return request in time to prevent any escalations.

How does a personal shopping assistant chatbot work?

A shopping assistant chatbot is trained and built on use cases that make shopping a breeze for your users. It assists your business to sell more and your customers to buy easily. Chatbots are of different types, based on their intelligence and applicative use.

A rule-based chatbot works on a set of specific instructions. They only respond to a defined set of rules and are triggered when the customer selects that input. For example, if you are an e-commerce store, you can use a rule-based chatbot to create defined conversation paths to address common use cases like returns and exchanges, deals and offers, payments, etc.

A shopping assistant built on conversational AI helps users interact more freely with the chatbot. An AI-driven shopping assistant chatbot works through four stages primarily. Here they are:

  • Input Acceptance
  • Input Analysis
  • Output Generation
  • Post-interaction bot training

1. Input Acceptance

The first thing a shopping chatbot does is accept the input given by the user. With Chat360, you can deploy your shopping assistant chatbot on platforms like your website, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook! Your multi-channel shopping chatbot lets your users connect with you wherever they are. 

For example, when a user sees your ad on Instagram, the CTA will lead them to your Instagram DMs, where they are greeted by your chatbot. “What type of products can I buy to avail of the Buy One Get One offer?”, the user asks.

2. Input Analysis

Your conversational AI chatbot can now use technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to assess the input.

The chatbot tries to pull the meaning out of the input to comprehend the query. Now, looking at the previous query, the chatbot determines that it’s a question about your ongoing seasonal sale.

3. Output Generation

Once the chatbot matches the intent with its knowledge base, it uses Natural Language Generation (NLG), to convert the response to text to send out to the user. 

4. Post-interaction Bot Training

The history of several user-bot interactions works as a cumulated reservoir of training data for the chatbot. This conversation will work as a learning experience for the chatbot to train and enhance its usability for future interactions. 

From this chat, it’s clear that users are not immediately clear about how the BOGO offer works even after they view your social ads. But now, this works as an insight for your business to improve upon your ad copies for any future marketing campaigns.

10 Key Benefits of E-commerce Shopping Chatbots

Shopping assistant chatbots are here to make life easier for you and your customers. A conversational AI chatbot for shopping can boost your sales and grow your revenue by multi-folds. Here are a few benefits of using an eCommerce shopping chatbot for your business:

1. 24×7 uninterrupted responses

Are you aware that eCommerce brands suffer an annual loss of $18 billion in sales revenue due to cart abandonment? This often occurs as a result of slow responsiveness on the brand’s part. In moments of urgency, customers seek swift and immediate assistance.

A shopping chatbot guarantees that all users receive timely responses simultaneously. Whether it’s day or night, customers can rely on the shopping chatbot as a round-the-clock eCommerce concierge for their inquiries.

2. Instant Customer Service

Chatbots offer instant responses to customer inquiries, helping shoppers find products, check stock availability, and get answers to questions without delay.

3. Personalized experiences

Your shopping chatbot leverages stored customer data to customize its responses effectively. This data, which includes user purchase history and previous conversations, enables the chatbot to grasp the user’s preferences and persona.

When a user requests information or assistance, the chatbot can proactively seek additional details, such as budget or preferred brand, to refine its search and provide highly personalized, relevant recommendations.

For instance, when a user asks the chatbot to ‘suggest headphones,’ it may prompt the user for specifics like budget and brand, allowing it to offer tailored choices.

4. Enhanced product navigation

Customers gain confidence in their decisions when they possess comprehensive knowledge about a product. This typically occurs during the consideration stage, when users seek detailed product specifications to make well-informed choices.

For instance, if a user is in the process of purchasing workout shoes, they can rely on the shopping chatbot to provide answers to queries related to the shoe’s construction, materials, ongoing offers, and more.

5. Seamless Transactions

Many shopping chatbots are integrated with payment gateways, allowing customers to complete purchases directly within the chat interface, making the buying process smooth and convenient.

6. Inventory Updates

Chatbots can provide real-time updates on product availability, promotions, and stock levels, reducing the likelihood of customers encountering out-of-stock items.

7. Order Tracking

Customers can use chatbots to track their orders, receive shipping updates, and get delivery information, improving transparency and reducing customer service inquiries.

8. Reduced Cart Abandonment

By assisting customers throughout the shopping journey and addressing their concerns, chatbots can help reduce cart abandonment rates, ultimately increasing conversions.

9. Data Collection and Analytics

Shopping chatbots can collect valuable data on customer behavior, preferences, and buying patterns, which businesses can use to refine their marketing strategies, product offerings, and customer engagement efforts.

10. Reduced costs

Consider running a digital store during an approaching annual sale event. The store will experience extended business hours and a surge in customer traffic. In such situations, you might instinctively consider increasing your staffing to ensure smooth operations, particularly for customer support.

However, from an economic standpoint, managing a manual support line can prove impractical. Here’s where a shopping chatbot can step in, helping you minimize your support costs by efficiently handling a significant portion of the rush hour inquiries. This allows you to deploy your agents to more critical tasks.

Exploring Shopping Assistant Chatbot Examples

Artificial intelligence is disrupting the online retail space. Many brands today are doing a tremendous job at engaging with their users and helping them better purchase decisions. Here are a few real-life shopping assistant chatbot examples to know more about!

1. Lego

We have all heard of Lego, right? But you probably haven’t heard of Ralph, Lego’s very own chatbot. Lego used the chatbot to handle its Christmas 2017 sales and it has only been an upwards journey. 

Ralph now makes shopping an experience for its customers all year long. Lego understands that toy shopping while sounding simple, is a meticulous decision.

This insight helps Ralph break down personalized toy options based on the budget, region, age of the receiver, etc.

2. Nike

Buying shoes is an incredibly personal decision. The right fit truly matters, and negotiation seldom has any room in the world of kicks!

Nike’s shopping chatbot StyleBot is self-explanatory. It helps show shoppers navigate Nike’s offerings based on their preferences like size, color, fit, etc.

What’s more interesting is that the chatbot even lets users play around and create their own designs, which they can get custom-made shoes delivered to their doorstep!

3. Domino’s

Ordering a pizza is in itself an oxytocin-fuelled experience. So, what if a chatbot makes the process even simpler?

Domino’s shopping chatbot is available on multiple channels to help pizza lovers curate their orders through simple conversations. 

The shopping chatbot helps users place orders, make payments and track order status in real time.

Conclusion

Shopping assistant chatbots have redefined the way customers shop and avail customer support online. With conversational AI’s innovative capabilities, many businesses are engaging and nurturing customer relationships that turn into long-term retention and brand loyalty.

With Chat360’s conversational AI chatbot solution, you can strengthen your eCommerce presence on your social channels. Connect with your users round the clock with a bot that’s built to solve industry use cases to achieve your business goals.

Sign up for a free trial!

How to use chatbots for marketing?

Having meaningful conversations is highly valued in marketing, and customers always look for engaging and personalized interactions. Unfortunately, making a human available all the time is not always possible, so companies are turning to the power of AI chatbots to bridge the gap. 

These AI-powered chatbots can provide customers with real-time, personalized conversations and assist them with frequently asked questions, product/service info, and more. This makes customers’ buying journey easier, quicker, and more enjoyable. 

According to a recent HubSpot Research study, 47% of shoppers are open to buying items from a bot. That’s a considerable improvement, and chatbots are the way to go if you’re looking to get ahead in the competitive world of marketing. 

This blog will explore how your business can use chatbots to boost marketing effectiveness. From understanding why chatbots to setting up processes that make the most of chatbot technology, you’ll be armed with the knowledge to take your marketing to the next level with chatbots. 

Why do you need chatbots for marketing?

Chatbot is quickly becoming an indispensable tool for marketing teams. For one, it automates mundane tasks, freeing agents’ time to focus on complex customer inquiries, and drives more sales. 

According to a Hubspot experiment, 75% of people interacted with chatbots more than a live chat feature on their website. Moreover, 55% of people who interacted with the chatbot answered the basic qualifying questions honestly.

The team at Hubspot credits this to how a chatbot naturally and instinctually navigates a conversation with a prospect. The NLP and AI-powered chatbot understands the users’ intent, changes its response based on the change in intent, and personalizes the whole experience. 

Using this technology there are many benefits from marketing chatbot. After learning what is WhatsApp Marketing, you can now learn five ways chatbots can benefit marketing teams: 

1. Improved Customer Service –

Chatbots can quickly and accurately respond to customer inquiries, freeing time for marketing teams to focus on other tasks. 

2. Increased Engagement –

Chatbots can reach a wider audience, engage them in conversations on multiple platforms, and carry forward the context, helping build trust and loyalty. 

3. Better Lead Generation –

Chatbots can collect lead data and provide personalized recommendations that can help generate more sales, both new and upsells. It also reduces the sales cycle. 

4. More Accurate Data Analysis –

Chatbots can analyze customer data to provide better insights into customer behavior for better marketing decisions and targeted campaigns. 

5. Lower Operating Costs –

By automating mundane tasks, chatbots can help save time and money, allowing businesses to invest in other areas.

Chatbot for marketing – What does it mean?

A chatbot for marketing is an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can interact with customers, prospects, and employees in real-time. It uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to provide an automated and personalized customer experience.

The conversational and automated approach to customer service, sales, and marketing help businesses respond to customer inquiries quickly and accurately to meet customer needs. Chatbots can help companies increase their sales by providing personalized product recommendations and customer follow-ups. 

In marketing, chatbots are used for various activities, including lead generation, customer segmentation, customer research, and content distribution. 

Overall, a chatbot for marketing can be a powerful tool for businesses to 

By providing an automated and personalized experience, chatbots can help businesses increase customer loyalty and retention.

Ways to use Chatbots for marketing

Chatbots automate customer service, sales, and marketing activities using AI and NLP capabilities. They are used to capture leads, promote products, and suggest additional items to customers by leveraging chatbots for marketing activities.

This section will discuss five ways businesses can use chatbots for marketing. 

1. Lead Generation: 

Chatbots can capture leads by asking questions and collecting customer information. This information can then identify potential customers and personalize sales messages. Lead generation bots can also send automated emails and other notifications to leads, prompting them to take immediate action. 

2. Complete Purchase Process: 

Not finding the right answers when the user is about to make a purchase leads to cart abandonment. Chatbots can answer customer inquiries and provide real-time support, guiding them throughout the buyers’ journey. It can also follow up with users who have abandoned the cart and encourage them to complete the purchase. 

3. Personalized Messages: 

Marketing teams can convert users better when the targeted messages are personalized and unique for every user. Chatbots can personalize customer messages by analyzing their demographic data and past interactions. This allows businesses to send more targeted messages tailored to customers’ preferences. 

4. Product Promotion: 

Chatbots can be used to promote products and services by sending notifications and messages to customers. These proactive messages can boost customer engagement with your brand and products and help businesses increase sales. What’s more, chatbots use rich media and aren’t limited to text and 2D graphics in their promotions. 

5. Cross-Selling and Upselling: 

Businesses can increase sales by suggesting additional items customers may be interested in purchasing. Chatbots are great at observing customer behavior and purchasing habits. Based on this data, the chatbot can recommend a related or supplementary product when the user is buying a product. These small nudges help cross-selling and upselling

Examples of marketing chatbots

Now that we’ve seen how your business can use a chatbot in marketing activities, let’s look at how some top brands are already using it to boost their marketing. 

1. Sephora: 

Sephora has a chatbot that helps customers book a makeup session with them. The chatbot is integrated with Facebook Messenger and ask the user a couple of question to book appointments at a location closest to them. Sephora has increased its booking orders by 11%. Due to the seamless experience, patrons who scheduled the apointment end up purchasing products worth $50 in-store. 

2. Nike: 

Nike’s chatbot, aka Stylebot, is designed to help customers find the right fit and style. The chatbot recommends products based on users’ preferences and enables them quickly and easily browse through the collection. With the Stylebot, Nike has been able to tap into its Facebook audience and increase its CTR by 12.5x and conversions by 4x. 

3. Burger King: 

Burger King’s chatbot, called “Niki,” helps customers order their favorite burgers and sides. It can also offer meal suggestions and help customers locate the nearest Burger King restaurant. Using images and conversational language, the bot has increased customer engagement and sales. 

4. Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas 

Cosmopolitan has a chatbot that helps guests make restaurant recommendations, book tables, spa treatments, event tickets, and self-guided tours, as well as answer questions about hotel services. According to the president of the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, guests who engaged with the chatbot spent 37% more than guests who didn’t engage with the chatbot. 

5. Starbucks: 

Starbucks is another top brand that uses a chatbot on their “My Barista” app to help customers order their favorite drinks and food. It can provide information, make recommendations, and even assist customers with payments. The users can personalize their experience further by using text or voice commands to order their coffee. 

How to implement marketing chatbots on your platform?

Chat360 is a no-code installation platform that helps businesses implement chatbots on their platform for marketing purposes. It is a powerful tool that helps automate customer service, target customer segmentation, and increase customer engagement. With Chat360, businesses can quickly build and deploy chatbots to help them acquire leads, engage customers, and collect feedback. 

Companies can customize their Chat360 bots to their specific needs and deploy them on their website, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. Businesses can integrate their CRM, eCommerce stores, email services, and payment gateways to instantly access existing customer data and better serve customer requests quickly. With its intelligent AI, the chatbots can also hand over the chat to an online agent.

Learn more on how to get started with Chat360 here.

Harnessing the power of AI chatbots for marketing

Chatbots are quickly becoming a powerful tool for businesses regarding marketing. With their ability to interact with customers 24/7 and provide personalized responses to their questions and inquiries, chatbots are revolutionizing how companies engage with customers. 

Studies have shown that chatbots can increase sales by up to 67% and lead to 24% higher customer satisfaction. Additionally, chatbots are estimated to save businesses an average of $8 billion in customer service costs. 

It’s an exciting time! By building an effective chatbot strategy, businesses can reap the rewards of improved customer relationships and boosted ROI. And with technology advancing every day, there’s no limit to what chatbots will be capable of doing in the future. 

So why not don your botmaster cape and get ahead of the competition? Take a trial today and build meaningful customer relationships with your innovative chatbot!

Next, read:

How to use Conversational AI Chatbot for Sales?

Omnichannel contact center

Making your business stand out hinges on your ability to offer exponential customer experience. And contact centers are of considerable importance when it comes to customer satisfaction. Yet most people are hesitant to approach call centers due to their frustrating experience while calling a company for service.

But things are different now. There has been a significant evolution in contact centers in the last two decades. It’s virtually unrecognizable from its predecessor. While phone calls were the primary touch point between any business and customers, today, we have omnichannel services like email, web chat, texting, and social media to stay in touch with customers. And that has taken customer experience to the whole next level.

The blog will guide you through what an omnichannel contact center is, some of its features, and its benefits.

What is an omnichannel contact center?

An omnichannel contact center is an interaction hub where the organization streamlines customer interaction from different communication channels like phone, chat, email, text (SMS), and social media.

The interactions of multiple channels are automatically synced with each other, which makes it easier for the representative to study past conversations and assist the customers better. Also, it means that customers can choose their preferred channels to interact whenever and wherever they like and continue from where they left off.

Why do we need omnichannel support for contact centers?

1. Better customer insight

Collecting information via omnichannel support like chat, social media, and forums is easier. You can access the chat transcript and evaluate the customer’s journey. Thereby depending on need, data and customer information can be quickly accumulated at any time. It gives you context on customers’ needs on various channels and how you should further interact with your clients.

Such information can be priceless as you can make improvements and always offer better service.

2. Improve agent productivity

If it’s a phone call, an agent can only speak to a single customer at a time. You need to hire more manpower to deal with a maximum number of clients. Whereas channels like chats and social media serve hundreds and thousands of customers at a time.

Therefore agents are loaded off from performing minor and repetitive tasks. As a result, they get to focus on more complex tasks and add real value to the organization.

3. Reduction in call center costs

Omnichannel support saves you a lot compared to support based entirely on phone calls. Many channels offer a self-help facility like a knowledge base. It encourages customers to help themselves with answers before turning to an agent.

It takes away a substantial operational burden from agents’ shoulders. That means you can save a lot of operating costs.

4. Enables brands to cater to a diverse audience

Having various automated communication channels allows you to engage with potential and existing customers. Social media or live chat engagement even helps you increase your customer base. The easy-to-use features and genuine reviews in social media have made it a popular channel for customers. Therefore you must have several channels as an option for engagement to strengthen the omnichannel customer experience.

5. Customer satisfaction

Customers are always happy with brands that offer an omnichannel customer experience. That is because it makes customer purchase journeys smoother, eliminating hurdles they face while interacting with your brand.

They perceive your brand the way you serve them. Leveraging more touchpoints for buyers allows you to understand how omnichannel benefits customers. If you don’t expand your channels, your customer’s buying experience is more likely to suffer, which will ultimately affect your business.

Omnichannel Contact Center vs Multi-channel Contact Centre

Both multichannel and omnichannel contact centers are similar to each other to some extent. They both deploy multiple channels for interactions. However, there are a few points that set apart multi-channel from omnichannel contact centers.

In a multi-channel contact center, the interaction that takes place in a particular channel stays in that channel. Customers who switch to another channel will have to repeat their stories from the start. For instance, if a customer approaches a company’s Facebook page and raises his problem regarding the product, then he is routed to talk to an agent via call. Here the customers have to repeat the complete details because the data in social media is not synced with phone calls.

However, omnichannel contact centers sync every channel with one another, making the customer journey more manageable. If a customer raises a concern about the product on the website chat, he might later on continue the conversation with the product specialist via live call. Here, he will not have to repeat himself after switching the channel.

The product specialist can easily access the previous website chat. It helps them prepare for a phone call.

Therefore it’s easier to switch communication channels for customers in omnichannel as compared to multi-channel.

In addition to that, multi-channel contact centers can be a bit more expensive due to the need for companies to hire more customer service agents. With an omnichannel contact center, businesses can set themselves up to deliver self-service, reducing operational costs.

What features do you need to look for in an Omnichannel Contact Center?

1. Omnichannel routing

This method assigns work to agents based on their expertise so that contacts connect to the right agent at the right time, irrespective of the interaction channel.

The interaction appears within the agent’s dashboard. The agent could type the response to the chat message without moving to any particular channel from where the query arises.

2. Customer sentiment analysis

Knowing how your customers feel about your brand leads to outstanding customer experience. Customer sentiment analysis uses AI to discover emotions in online communication that helps you understand customers’ feelings. It guides the business to respond effectively to its customers.

The sentiment analysis uses NLP and algorithms to detect patterns in text and differentiate opinions as positive, negative, or neutral. It also identifies some keywords like “tracking,” “late order,” ” return” etc.

3. Software Integration

Software integration brings together two or more channels and works in tandem. It makes it possible to consolidate data from disparate channels and get accurate information.

It promotes better functionality and performance across various channels. It simplifies complex business processes by unifying them under a single interface. Therefore your contact center should integrate with the best third-party CRM for a seamless customer experience.

4. Analytics and Reporting

Analyzing live and past communication helps the contact center analyze the KPIs. It helps admins evaluate the efficiency of every department and individual and identify the backlog in channels.

The analytics include:

  • Average phone/video call duration
  • Most interacted channel
  • An average number of outbound interactions, and rate of engagement.
  • Cost per contact, average hold time, average response time.
  • Customer satisfaction rate (CSAT score)

Challenges in implementing Omni channel for call center

1. Customer data synchronization

You can only offer seamless omnichannel customer support when you have up-to-date information about customers. And that includes contact information, purchase history, etc. But that is not always the case.

Most of the time, data is found spread across various systems. You might have a help desk system for support requests, CRM for sales, and an e-commerce platform for purchase history. It makes it challenging to have a complete picture of your customer.

Not just that, you might update a customer’s address in your CRM but fail to update it in the helpdesk system. Hence data is not synchronized, which might cause data loss.

2. Organizational silos

In most organizations, separate teams take care of different channels, products, or services. However, a simple journey that stays within particular silos may function well, but no one is accountable for the overall customer experience.

As a result, businesses fail to understand how customers perceive their brand and how they interact. And customers find the brand responsible for the overall experience. Especially if the organization is siloed, the performance of each silo may be measured individually. But the fact is that the total customer experience is not just the sum of its parts.

For instance, your channels, like phone, and video chats, may all be performing well, but the lack of integration will ruin the whole experience.

3. Legacy system

The way brands deal with, and process customer inquiries have evolved. They have adopted and modified their system, but their lack of agility has failed to meet ever-evolving customers’ requirements.

Organizations that are used to their legacy system find it difficult to integrate systems outside the silo.

The ability to use and adapt new technology improves business effectiveness and creates a better front-line customer experience.

4. Data management and governance

While creating a holistic journey for customers by integrating various interaction channels, you must also bring together the data.

Just like diverse channels being integrated, the data are various as well. So there’s always a privacy concern regarding sensitive credentials. Since multiple platforms are involved, there’s a concern related to data theft, fraud, and other privacy breaches.

Conclusion

You can grow your business faster and build an everlasting relationship with your customers, assisting them throughout their journey. All you need to do is leverage customer interactions across the channels customers prefer.

With Chat360, you can have multiple channels and one interface. It allows you to streamline your business workflow by configuring impactful business rules in omnichannel contact center software. You can book a free demo for a better understanding.

Further, read:

5 Ways to Make Customer Support Automation as your Strategic Advantage

How to use Chatbots to collect and improve CSAT?

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is an essential metric for businesses to measure how satisfied customers are with their experience and identify areas for improvement. CSAT can be measured through surveys, feedback forms, and other methods. Chatbots are an increasingly popular way for businesses to measure customer satisfaction.

Chatbots helping a business to get feedback by the user on using a service

Chatbots are computer programs that simulate natural conversations with customers, making it easy to ask them questions about their experiences. This allows businesses to quickly collect customer feedback, which can then be used to improve their products and services.

Businesses can collect real-time feedback, giving them an accurate picture of customers’ sentiments at any time. Using this data, they can make changes to meet customer needs better.

How can you measure Customer Satisfaction Score?

Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT) come in various types, each serving a distinct purpose. From Overall CSAT for holistic feedback to Transactional CSAT focusing on specific interactions, and Agent-Specific CSAT pinpointing service quality, these metrics offer nuanced insights into customer satisfaction, vital for refining business strategies and enhancing customer experiences.

Below present table give information on the different types of Customer Satisfaction Score:

CSAT Type Description
Overall CSAT Measures a customer’s satisfaction with a company’s overall products, services, or experiences.
Transactional CSAT Assesses customer satisfaction after a specific interaction, such as a purchase, support call, or service request.
Touchpoint CSAT Focuses on satisfaction at specific touchpoints in the customer journey, like website navigation, checkout process, etc.
Product CSAT Evaluates satisfaction with a particular product or set of products.
Service CSAT Gauges satisfaction with the quality and effectiveness of customer service or support provided.
Post-Interaction CSAT Measures satisfaction after a customer has interacted with a company through various channels (online, phone, in-person).
In-App CSAT Collects satisfaction feedback directly within a mobile or web application, often after the user completes a task or action.
Agent-Specific CSAT Evaluates customer satisfaction with a specific support agent or representative.
Periodic CSAT Conducts satisfaction assessments at regular intervals to track changes over time and identify long-term trends.
Point-of-Sale (PoS) CSAT Assesses satisfaction immediately after a purchase, typically used in retail or e-commerce contexts.

 

Rating scale which is used to get feedback

Chatbots for CSAT – What does it mean?

Chatbots collect customer satisfaction data quickly and easily, making them an efficient tool for businesses. They can be used to send automated messages to customers, ask more detailed questions, and provide faster insights into customer satisfaction. In addition, companies can save time and resources by automating customer feedback.

Here are five reasons businesses should use chatbots to collect CSAT:

1. Chatbots can send automated messages to customers, making it easier to reach out to more customers and increase response rates.

2. Chatbots can be programmed to ask customers more detailed questions and provide more accurate feedback.
are more cost-effective than traditional customer satisfaction surveys, as they require no manual labour and can be set up quickly and easily.

3. Chatbots can collect customer feedback in real time, allowing businesses to make quick decisions to improve customer satisfaction.

4. Chatbots can be programmed to automatically respond to customer feedback and provide personalized responses, allowing companies to save time and resources.

Benefits of using Chatbots for improving CSAT

Optimizing Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is essential for any business as it helps measure the CSAT score and the success of customer service. Here are five reasons why you should optimize your CSAT:

1. Improved Customer Retention:

If customers are happy with the service they receive, they are likely to return and even refer other customers.

2. Increased Revenue:

Customers with high CSAT scores are more likely to purchase additional products and services, increasing business revenues.

3. Reduced Customer Complaints:

Customers who are satisfied with their customer service experience are less likely to complain, reducing the load on your customer service agents.

4. Improved Brand Image:

Satisfied customers are more likely to share their positive experiences with others, thus improving the organization’s brand image.

5. Higher Customer Satisfaction:

Optimizing CSAT helps ensure that the customer service experience meets customer expectations and helps the organization understand its customers better.

Ways to use Chatbots for CSAT

A study by Deloitte found that over 50% of customers prefer to be supported by bots over humans, and more than 70% of customers would use a chatbot if offered one. Companies that adopt chatbot technology can quickly capture and gain insights from customer feedback.

Chatbots allow companies to respond to customer inquiries quickly and efficiently, and they can help to reduce the time and effort it takes to collect CSAT scores. Additionally, companies can use chatbots to track customer satisfaction over time and use the data to determine areas of improvement.

For customers, chatbots provide an easy and convenient way to share feedback on their experience with a company.

The following are five methods for using chatbots to collect CSAT:

1. Automated surveys:

CSAT chatbots can send automated surveys to customers after they have completed a purchase or interacted with the company. The surveys can collect CSAT data and gain insight into the customer experience.

2. Conversation-based surveys:

Chatbots can be used to create conversation-based surveys. This allows customers to provide feedback in an informal, conversational way without forms, resulting in higher responses.

3. Real-time feedback:

CSAT chatbots can also be used to collect real-time feedback from customers. This allows a company to get feedback on their products and services in the moment of their service, which can help them improve their customer experience.

4. Follow-up surveys:

Follow-up surveys can be used to collect CSAT data after some time since the customer has interacted with the company. Chatbots can send out follow-up surveys to customers on their preferred channels and gather feedback on how the company performed.

5. Customer service surveys:

A customer service chatbot can be used to collect CSAT data. The agent handling the live chat can ask customers about their experience with the company and provide feedback on how the company can improve.

How to implement CSAT Chatbots on your platform?

Businesses can use Chat360’s chatbot to implement a CSAT chatbot and increase customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. CSAT chatbots powered by NLP are a great way to understand customer behavior, gain insights into customer satisfaction, and identify improvement areas.

Chat360’s chatbot can be integrated into existing customer support systems, allowing businesses to respond to customer inquiries quickly and efficiently, at different touchpoints. Companies can collect customer feedback to gain insights into customer needs and expectations.

What sets them apart is that Chat360’s CSAT chatbots can be customized to meet a business’s and its customers’ specific needs. It can be used to set up automated surveys that customers can take at any time, allowing companies to collect customer feedback in real time.

Schedule a free demo today!

What is NPS (Net Promoter Score)?

A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction with a company’s product or service. It measures the likelihood of customers recommending the brand to others on a scale from 0 to 10. 

Net Promoter Score is categorized as promoters (scoring 9-10), passives (scoring 7-8), or detractors (scoring 0-6). NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, disregarding passives. 

Therefore, one can calculate the NPS using the formula NPS= % Promoters-% Detractors

This simple metric offers insights into customer sentiment and helps businesses identify areas for improvement in their offerings.

Net Promoter Score Categorization

Net Promoter Score (NPS) employs a scale from 0 to 10 to evaluate customer satisfaction and loyalty. Respondents are segmented into three distinct categories based on their ratings. 

1. Promoters: Promoters, typically scoring 9 or 10, are the advocates of your business who enthusiastically endorse the brand, contributing to its growth through positive word-of-mouth. 

2. Passives: Passive, with scores of 7 or 8, exhibit moderate satisfaction but lack the same level of advocacy, often remaining neutral in their recommendations. 

3. Detractors: Detractors, scoring between 0 and 6, express dissatisfaction and are prone to negative word-of-mouth, potentially impacting the brand’s reputation. 

This classification framework enables businesses to identify areas for improvement, cultivate strong customer relationships, and foster brand advocacy.

Leveraging Multichannel Campaigns to Boost Net Promoter Score (NPS)

To enhance their Net Promoter Score (NPS), businesses utilize a diverse array of campaigns implemented across multiple communication channels. These campaigns aim to actively engage with customers, gather feedback, address concerns, and foster positive relationships. By deploying strategies such as email campaigns, social media engagement, website optimization, and more, businesses seek to influence customer perceptions and experiences positively. Each channel offers unique opportunities to interact with customers, gather insights, and ultimately improve NPS scores by focusing on enhancing satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. Through strategic campaign planning and execution, businesses can effectively elevate their NPS and cultivate strong customer relationships. These channels include:

1. Email Surveys: Businesses send surveys via email to collect feedback from customers. These surveys typically contain questions related to the customer’s experience and likelihood of recommending the product or service.

2. Website Feedback Forms: Feedback forms are embedded on company websites, allowing visitors to provide feedback directly on their experience with the site’s usability, content, or products/services.

3. Social Media Platforms: Companies engage with customers on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to gather feedback, address concerns, and build relationships. Social media also serves as a platform for customers to share their experiences publicly.

4. Phone Surveys: Companies conduct surveys over the phone to gather feedback from customers. These surveys may involve scripted questions or open-ended discussions about the customer’s experience.

5. SMS/Text Message Surveys: Short surveys are sent to customers via text message to gather quick feedback on their experience with a product or service.

6. In-App Feedback Tools: Mobile applications often include built-in feedback mechanisms that allow users to provide feedback directly within the app, offering insights into their experience and satisfaction levels.

7. Online Chat Support: Businesses offer online chat support on their websites or mobile apps, providing customers with a direct channel to communicate their feedback, ask questions, and receive assistance in real-time.

8. Customer Review Platforms: Companies monitor and respond to reviews on platforms like Yelp, Google Reviews, and TripAdvisor, addressing customer feedback and publicly demonstrating their commitment to customer satisfaction.

9. Focus Groups: Businesses organize focus groups consisting of a select group of customers to gather in-depth feedback and insights on specific products, services, or experiences.

10. Customer Advisory Boards: Companies establish advisory boards comprising loyal customers who provide ongoing feedback, insights, and suggestions for improving products, services, and overall customer experience.

11. Customer Experience Events/Webinars: Businesses host events or webinars focused on customer experience, providing opportunities for customers to engage directly with company representatives, share feedback, and learn about new products or initiatives.

12. Net Promoter Score Software Platforms: Specialized software platforms are used to automate the collection, analysis, and reporting of Net Promoter Score data, allowing companies to track and manage customer feedback more effectively.

13. Community Forums/Groups: Companies create online communities or forums where customers can interact with each other, share experiences, ask questions, and provide feedback directly to the company.

14. Customer Feedback Hotlines: Dedicated phone lines are established for customers to call and provide feedback, voice concerns, or seek assistance from customer service representatives.

15. Mystery Shopping Programs: Companies employ mystery shoppers to evaluate the customer experience by anonymously interacting with the company’s products, services, and staff, providing valuable insights into areas for improvement.

Why do you need to optimize the Net Promoter Score?

The higher the NPS, the more likely the users will recommend your business. Hence businesses need to optimize the NPS.

Here are some of the benefits of optimizing the Net Promoter Score:

  • A high NPS indicates high customer loyalty, and optimizing it helps increase this number.
  • By collecting NPS surveys, companies can identify areas of improvement.
  • Businesses can gain a competitive advantage with word-of-mouth marketing.
  • A high NPS ensures recurring customers, which translates to a continuous income stream.
  • Businesses can improve their customer service by addressing customer concerns.

How to use chatbots to collect and improve NPS?

Chatbots serve as versatile tools for engaging customers in meaningful conversations aimed at gathering valuable feedback, thereby playing a crucial role in enhancing Net Promoter Score (NPS). 

These AI-powered chatbots provide businesses with a dynamic and efficient channel through which they can interact with customers in real-time. By initiating proactive conversations, chatbots can prompt customers to share their opinions, satisfaction levels, and suggestions, facilitating the collection of actionable feedback. Moreover, chatbots offer a convenient and accessible platform for customers to express their thoughts, eliminating barriers to communication and increasing response rates. 

This seamless interaction fosters a sense of engagement and partnership between businesses and customers, ultimately contributing to improvements in NPS by addressing concerns and enhancing overall satisfaction.

Here’s how businesses can utilize chatbots effectively:

1. Real-time Feedback Collection: Implement chatbots on websites, mobile apps, or messaging platforms to initiate conversations with customers and solicit feedback on their experiences. Chatbots can ask targeted questions related to NPS, such as likelihood to recommend and reasons for their score, facilitating real-time data collection.

2. Personalized Interactions: Customize chatbot interactions based on customer data and behavior to deliver personalized experiences. By tailoring questions and responses to individual preferences and past interactions, businesses can enhance engagement and gather more insightful feedback.

3. Seamless Integration with NPS Software: Integrate chatbots with NPS software platforms to automate the collection and analysis of feedback data. This streamlines the process of aggregating responses, identifying trends, and generating actionable insights to improve NPS scores.

4. Proactive Issue Resolution: Use chatbots to proactively address customer concerns and resolve issues in real time. By identifying dissatisfied customers through NPS feedback, chatbots can initiate conversations to offer assistance, rectify problems, and prevent negative sentiment from impacting NPS.

5. Continuous Improvement: Leverage chatbot analytics to monitor performance metrics, such as response rates and user satisfaction. Analyzing chatbot interactions and feedback trends enables businesses to identify areas for improvement in their NPS collection processes and refine chatbot strategies accordingly.

6. Multichannel Deployment: Deploy chatbots across multiple communication channels, including websites, social media platforms, and messaging apps, to reach customers wherever they prefer to engage. This omnichannel approach ensures broader outreach and maximizes feedback collection opportunities.

7. Educational Resources and Promotions: In addition to collecting feedback, chatbots can provide customers with educational resources, product information, or promotional offers based on their NPS responses. By offering value-added content or incentives, businesses can foster positive experiences and encourage higher NPS scores.

By leveraging chatbots strategically in NPS initiatives, businesses can enhance customer engagement, streamline feedback collection processes, and drive improvements in overall satisfaction and loyalty.

Chatbots for NPS – What does it mean?

Chatbots are a powerful tool for businesses to collect customer feedback and sentiment, including Net Promoter Score (NPS). Its interactive methods allow companies to request users to submit feedback, identify potential issues, and improve customer service.

Here are five reasons why brands should use chatbots to collect NPS:

1. Speed and accuracy:

Chatbots enable businesses to quickly and efficiently collect customer feedback. Because of AI, they can decipher customer intent accurately and respond to customers appropriately. As soon as a conversation is over, the chatbot can request quick feedback to collect NPS scores from many people.

2. Cost Savings:

Chatbots are cost-effective and require little to no maintenance or operational costs. Moreover, chatbots can collect NPS from customers around the clock, even beyond business hours. This makes them an excellent choice for businesses seeking to reduce costs while still collecting valuable customer feedback.

3. Customization:

Chatbots can be customized to fit the needs of the business, allowing companies to ask specific questions or tailor the survey to the customer. This helps ensure that the feedback collected is relevant and meaningful.

4. Improved engagement and personalization:

Chatbots are interactive and engaging, making them more likely to capture customers’ attention. Further, they can be personalized to customers’ preferences, allowing businesses to send tailored surveys based on customer data. This helps to ensure that the feedback collected is accurate and relevant to the customer, resulting in more meaningful NPS scores.

5. Customer convenience:

Chatbots enable customers to provide feedback quickly and conveniently without filling out long surveys. The feedback collection can also be implemented on multiple channels based on customers’ preferences. This makes it easier for customers to provide feedback, increasing the likelihood of a higher response rate.

Benefits of Utilizing Chatbots for NPS

Chatbots represent a game-changing asset for businesses in their quest to gather and leverage customer feedback, particularly regarding Net Promoter Score (NPS). Here’s why integrating chatbots into NPS initiatives yields significant advantages:

1. Rapid Response and Precision:

Thanks to their AI capabilities, chatbots swiftly interpret customer queries and deliver accurate responses. Post-interaction, chatbots can promptly solicit feedback, enabling businesses to swiftly amass NPS scores from a wide customer base.

2. Cost-Efficiency:

Chatbots offer a cost-effective solution for NPS collection, requiring minimal maintenance and operational expenditure. Their ability to operate 24/7 ensures continuous feedback acquisition, presenting an economical option for businesses keen on budget optimization without compromising data quality.

3. Tailored Surveys:

Customization lies at the core of chatbot functionality, allowing businesses to craft tailored surveys that align with their specific objectives. This bespoke approach ensures that feedback gathered is both relevant and insightful, enhancing the value derived from NPS assessments.

4. Enhanced Engagement and Personalization:

By virtue of their interactive nature, chatbots captivate customer attention more effectively than traditional feedback methods. Furthermore, their adaptability enables personalized interactions based on individual customer preferences and behavior. This personalized touch not only increases engagement but also ensures that the feedback received is pertinent and actionable, thereby enriching NPS evaluations.

5. Streamlined Customer Experience:

Chatbots streamline the feedback process, offering customers a convenient avenue to express their opinions without the hassle of lengthy surveys. Moreover, their multi-channel deployment accommodates diverse customer preferences, allowing feedback collection across various platforms. This convenience factor boosts response rates, facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of customer sentiment and driving improvements in NPS scores.

Implement NPS Chatbots on your platform with Chat360

Businesses can use Chat360’s chatbot to implement an NPS chatbot and increase customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. NPS chatbots are a great way to gain insights into customer satisfaction and identify areas of improvement.

Chat360’s chatbot can be integrated into existing customer support systems, allowing businesses to respond to customer inquiries quickly and efficiently. Additionally, NPS chatbots can be used to collect feedback from customers, helping companies to gain insights into customer needs and expectations.

What sets them apart is that Chat360’s NPS chatbot can be customized to meet a business’s and its customers’ specific needs. It can be used to set up automated surveys that customers can take at any time, allowing companies to collect customer feedback in real time.

Additionally, through natural language processing, Chat360’s chatbot can understand customer queries and provide personalized responses. All this adds up to excellent customer experience and reduced costs for the business

Want to know more on how we do it? Schedule a free demo today!

Omni channel customer service strategy and case study

Your competitors are just a click away from your customers, you must provide a personalized customer experience so that your customers happily stay loyal to your brand. And Omni channel customer service is a key driver for customer satisfaction..

Customers connect emotionally to those brands to whom they can easily connect via any channel (phone, email, social media, web chat, etc). And it’s not just customers who benefit from it, even businesses can fulfill their orders from anywhere.

As per Internet retailer companies having a strong Omni channel customer service strategy have customer retention of an average of 89% as compared with 33% for companies with a weak strategy.

Omni channel customer support strategy that leading brands use

Starbucks email strategy

In 2018, Starbucks had 60 million loyal groups of customers who were actively enrolled in Starbucks rewards, but those customers didn’t have any digital relationship with the brand.

Therefore Starbucks implemented an Omni channel retailing strategy. They forced a digital relationship by providing free wifi in exchange for an email ID. For that, they offered a solution where users would get a 10% off code in exchange for their email address.

The newly acquired email addresses were then used to drive retention and purchase frequency.
They sent unique triggered emails with discount offers on specific products which expired on the same day and were available during a certain timeframe.

The strategy helped Starbucks to drive digitally registered customers into stores during non-peak hours.

Spotify uses social media support for a better customer experience

Days are gone when you had to simply send a request for your favorite songs and wait for them to play on the radio or television. Or save some bucks to buy cassettes and CDs to listen to your favorite song.

Today, you can stream your favorite songs online or offline via mobile phones, computers, and smart TVs. And Spotify has been one of the major drivers causing a shift in the way we consume music.
Not just that, their outstanding customer support has won them the Webby Award for social media customer support.

Spotify leverages its product on social media like Twitter. Those Spotify users who reach out to the Twitter handle @SpotifyCares get to listen to thematically appropriate songs selected by the support team. Not many brands have the opportunity to play their songs on other social media platforms.

Not just that, Spotify offers a knowledge base where consumers can find up-to-date contents about the product and service whenever they want without having to wait for the support team to fetch a suitable solution.

National Geographic

National Geographic employed a conversational chatbot who would interact like Einstein. The bot was created to promote their new show Genius. It would reply to the users with information about the show and other interesting facts.

The bot made the users feel connected by answering professional and personal questions in real-time in a human and friendly way.

As a result, there were 6-8 minutes of average conversation, 11 turns per conversation, and 50% of user re-engagement. Thereby the user-friendly chatbot strategy did a wonderful job.

Case studies of Omni channel customer service enabled companies

AirHelp

AirHelp is a famous brand that advocates and protects passengers’ rights. By now it helped more than 16 million passengers with delayed, canceled, and overbooked flights.

Challenges

Having a support team in over 35 markets who spoke 16 languages, AirHelp faced problems in monitoring their performance through their social media profiles with a single dashboard.

They wanted to reduce the agent’s response time with proper ticket assignment but couldn’t assign the ticket to the right expert due to the language barrier.

Solution

AirHelp Implemented an Omni channel support strategy and integrated social media and messaging apps.

They added 846 response templates to improve response time.

Incorporated one dashboard to evaluate all metrics of customer service, assign resources based on real-time data, and measure team performance with the help of KPI.

Result

  • It helped AirHelp to improve their response time on Facebook by 65%
  • Their customer service coverage expanded.

Datamatics

Datamatics is a technology company that builds data-driven business intelligence solutions to digitally transform itself with the help of Robotics, AI, mobility, cloud, and advanced analytics.

Challenges

The clients asked for better customer service. The lack of efficient customer service resources largely affected the customer experience. Therefore Datamatics wanted to provide exceptional customer service to their ever-growing client base which in return would help in the growth of a digital marketplace business on an expandable platform.

Solution

Datamatics focused on customer service infrastructure and deployed Omni channel customer service (phone, email, chat support) and dwindled issues related to service and scalability.

Result

  • The quality output increased to 98.33%.
  • The live chat answer response improved by 98%.
  • There was a reduction in email TAT by 4hrs.
  • Feedback rating on Amazon virtual marketplace improved to 5.0.

Walmart case study

Walmart is a very famous retail corporation from the USA, headquartered in Arkansas. It’s well known for operating discount department stores, grocery stores, and a chain of hypermarkets.

Challenges

Founded in 1969, Walmart grew exponentially by opening large stores in the suburbs, streamlining its supply chain, and offering high sales at low profits. But the rise of E-commerce giants like Amazon lured away their customers. As a result, they were losing customers.

Solution

Studying the crisis, in 2010, Walmart opted for the Omni channel strategy. Having a large network, they made the most out of it by focusing on improving customer satisfaction and increasing sales at existing stores. Started Offering online grocery delivery service which delivered the food ordered online from stores to customer’s doorstep. Also, it allowed customers to receive products purchased online at the store parking via ‘online grocery pickup’.

Result

Walmart’s performance returned to life. Their online sales would now compete with Amazon.

How to implement omnichannel support for your business?

Identify customers

Before you implement Omni channel support for your customers, you need to identify your prospective customers first. You can’t sell your product to just anyone and everyone. You need to understand who your idle customers are going to be. You need to have a target audience. It makes the Omni channel strategy more effective.

You should be aware of your customer’s demographic, customers’ behavior, the preferred mode of communication, buying habits, and various other preferences.

Digging into the minute details helps you assist your customers better.

Conduct audience segmentation

Once you have a detailed understanding of your target audience, categorize them into groups. It helps you offer relevant products to the right customers.

Customers get frustrated when they receive irrelevant content. Segmentation helps you offer personalized service.

And if you think segmentation is a tough task. Worry not. Most Omni channel marketing automation solutions carry out rule-based customer segmentation based on the target audience you’ve set. It can be based on gender, customer loyalty, previous engagement level, geography, etc. The solution allows you to even customize the persona if you want to expand them.

Prioritize channels and devices

Be it using your website or speaking with support agents over the phone, every channel has a unique role to play. Customers perceive your brand as per their experience. There are innumerable channels. Each of them provides a unique customer experience. The channel you select to bring your customer strategy to life is equally as crucial as the messages that you communicate on their platforms.

However, selecting the right support channel that mixes right with your organization is not that simple. You’ll have to be mindful while selecting the right channel.

For instance, individuals in traditional sectors may expect human interaction, while individuals working in fast-moving technology sectors may prefer a high-level response via devices.

Use analytics to understand your audience’s preferences and select the right channel.

Integrate Omni channel

Integrating all the online and offline touchpoints is the toughest part of adopting Omni channel customer support.
Smooth integration of different channels forms the foundation of the Omni channel strategy. Failing to integrate the channels successfully will harm your business.

You’ll have to carefully select the right set of technologies to smoothen the process.

Chat360 helps you unite different channels that involve tracking your customers and their shopping experience across every channel and connecting it with others without having to use heavy codes or programming language.

Train your team

Customer support staff are the pillar of customer service. Since social media is expanding, smartphones are upgrading, and websites are updated every day, the support team should be able to adapt to the change and understand current expectations.

Therefore proper training plays a huge role in keeping the staff updated. Make sure your support agent understands Facebook, Twitter, and other channels, along with contact center AI software, to offer a flawless customer experience.

Measure your performance

While implementing an Omni channel customer support strategy, you should also define the key performance indicators (KPI) that measure the success of the strategy. Accessing your omni channel strategy is critical to understand what is working and where improvement is required.

With several channels in the mix, it can be difficult to evaluate them and compare their results. And for that, you might need tools to study all the cross-channel data. Therefore keep an eye on reports and analytical data as they give you an idea about which way your campaign is heading.

Also, only measuring the efficiency is not enough. Your Omni channel strategy should be flexible enough to adapt to continuous growth and development.

Conclusion

An omni channel strategy streamlines your communication channels, enabling your team and customer to work smoothly between them. It promotes Quality service that improves ROI. It’s no wonder most enterprises are investing in providing omnichannel support.

Thereby, follow best practices for perfect omnichannel customer support. 24/7 availability and outstanding mobile service will boost sales.

How to use Chatbots for improving CRO?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of maximizing the number of people who take a desired action on a website. And chatbots for CRO are a great tool to achieve this.

For every business, having an effective website is essential to reach potential customers and gain more online traffic. But getting traffic to the website doesn’t achieve the business goal of making money. This traffic needs to take action. In other words, convert. These actions could be buying a product or a service, subscribing to a newsletter, booking a meeting, or clicking on a link.

Chatbots improve customer experience by sharing the correct information at the right time, reducing steps to complete a process, decreasing wait times, etc. This, in turn, helps in improving conversion rate optimization.

Why do you need to optimize the conversion rate?

Increasing the conversion rate means getting more value from the visitor, thereby reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC). Optimizing the conversion rate can increase the revenue per user, get more customers, and eventually grow your business.

For example, if your website homepage gets a traffic of 2000 visitors per month and a conversion rate of 10%, then it means 200 people are taking action on your website. Now let’s increase this conversion rate by 5%. At a 15% conversion rate, you get 300 people to take action on your website homepage.

As you can see from the above example, CRO directly impacts how your visitors interact with your website, leading to better user engagement. It helps you get more customers without driving more visitors to your website, hence allowing you to reduce your marketing budget.

Optimizing the conversion rate also warrants a better understanding of your audience and more relevant leads. It helps you send out the right message at the right time. Which in turn builds trust. In exchange, users share email addresses and phone numbers with your business. A win-win.

Chatbots for CRO – What does it mean?

CRO chatbot engages with website visitors using personalized conversations and provides tailored responses in real time. They optimize the conversion rate by improving customer experience. Some ways it does that are:

  1. Answer customer questions instantly
  2. Help them find the product/service they are looking for
  3. Walk them through the checkout process
  4. Fill forms in a conversational manner
  5. Collect feedback about their experience

The best part is chatbots can offer personalized services at scale. It becomes crucial as you grow your business. A small business with 200 visitors a month might still be able to pay attention to every customer visiting the website. But as you grow to 1000, 10,000, or 1,00,000 visitors a month, assigning resources to cater to every visitor is burdensome and expensive. Chatbot solves both these problems.

Moreover, a chatbot isn’t just a tool to personalize conversations. It’s also a tool for customer rate optimization. Businesses can increase the number of website visitors converting into customers who take the desired actions on a page.

Choosing the Right Chatbot Platform

Selecting an appropriate chatbot platform is a critical decision that significantly influences the success of your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) efforts. The right platform ensures seamless integration, scalability, and an enhanced user experience. Here’s a guide to help you make an informed choice:

Key Considerations:

Scalability and Flexibility:

Look for a platform that can scale with your business growth. It should offer flexibility to adapt to evolving needs and integrate seamlessly with your existing systems.

Integration Capabilities:

Ensure the chosen platform can integrate with your analytics tools, customer databases, and other relevant systems. This integration is vital for obtaining comprehensive data insights to enhance CRO.

Ease of Customization:

Choose a platform that allows easy customization of chatbot interactions. Tailoring the chatbot’s responses to align with your brand voice and specific CRO goals is crucial for success.

User-Friendly Interface:

A user-friendly interface is essential for your team to efficiently manage and update chatbot functionalities. Consider platforms that offer intuitive dashboards and easy-to-use tools.

Multichannel Support:

Opt for a platform that supports multiple communication channels, such as website chat, social media, and messaging apps. This ensures a consistent user experience across various touchpoints.

Security and Compliance:

Prioritize platforms that adhere to robust security measures and comply with data protection regulations. Protecting user data is paramount to building trust and ensuring legal compliance.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Capabilities:

Choose a platform with advanced NLP capabilities. Natural language processing enables chatbots to understand and respond to user queries more accurately, enhancing the overall user experience.

Popular Chatbot Platforms:

Chat360:

Known for its no-code installation, Chat360 offers businesses a quick and customizable solution for deploying chatbots across various platforms, including websites, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger.

IBM Watson Assistant:

IBM Watson Assistant is renowned for its powerful AI capabilities, providing businesses with advanced tools for creating intelligent chatbots with natural language understanding.

Microsoft Azure Bot Service:

Azure Bot Service is an integrated environment by Microsoft that facilitates the development, testing, and deployment of chatbots across multiple channels.

Measuring CRO Success with Key Metrics

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) with chatbots involves tracking specific metrics to evaluate their effectiveness in driving desired user actions. By focusing on key metrics tailored to chatbot interactions, businesses can assess performance and refine strategies for enhanced outcomes. Here are essential metrics for measuring CRO success with chatbots:

Conversion Rate of Chatbot Interactions (CRI):

 

CRI measures the percentage of users engaging with the chatbot who successfully complete the desired action. It could include making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or accessing specific information. A rising CRI indicates the chatbot’s positive impact on conversions.

User Engagement Rate:

User engagement rate gauges the level of interaction users have with the chatbot. This includes the number of initiated conversations, questions asked, and responses provided. A high engagement rate signifies the chatbot’s effectiveness in capturing user attention.

Task Completion Rate:

Task completion rate assesses the percentage of users who successfully accomplish their intended tasks with the chatbot’s assistance. Whether it’s finding information, making a reservation, or troubleshooting, a higher completion rate reflects successful user journeys.

Response Time:

Response time measures the speed at which the chatbot delivers replies to user queries. A prompt response time contributes to a positive user experience and is crucial for keeping users engaged. Monitoring and minimizing response time is key for CRO success.

User Satisfaction Score (CSAT) for Chatbot Interactions:

CSAT specifically for chatbot interactions gathers user feedback on satisfaction. Users can rate their experience with the chatbot, providing valuable insights into the quality of interactions. High CSAT scores indicate a positive impact on user satisfaction and potential conversions.

Drop-off Rate

Drop-off rate measures the percentage of users who disengage or exit the chatbot interaction prematurely. Identifying points of drop-off helps in refining chatbot scripts and user journeys to minimize user abandonment and enhance CRO.

Intent Recognition Accuracy:

For chatbots using natural language processing (NLP), intent recognition accuracy assesses how well the chatbot understands user queries. Higher accuracy ensures that the chatbot provides relevant responses, positively influencing user actions.

Click-Through Rate within Chatbot:

Click-through rate within the chatbot measures the percentage of users who click on suggested links or calls to action presented by the chatbot. A higher click-through rate indicates successful guidance toward desired actions.

User Retention:

User retention measures the percentage of users who return to engage with the chatbot over time. A high retention rate signifies ongoing value and effectiveness in maintaining user interest, contributing to sustained CRO success.

Task Abandonment Rate:

Task abandonment rate calculates the percentage of users who initiate a task with the chatbot but do not complete it. Analyzing task abandonment helps in optimizing chatbot flows and addressing potential friction points in the user journey.

Implementing a Comprehensive Measurement Strategy for Chatbots:

To effectively measure CRO success with chatbots, businesses should integrate these metrics into their analytics tools, leveraging platforms like Chat360, IBM Watson Assistant, or Microsoft Azure Bot Service. Regularly analyze the data, identify patterns, and iteratively optimize chatbot scripts and functionalities based on insights gained from these key metrics. This iterative process ensures continuous improvement and sustained success in leveraging chatbots for Conversion Rate Optimization.

Ways to use Chatbots for Conversion Rate Optimization

We have established why CRO is important for your business. And we have also said that chatbots can help you optimize the conversion rate. Now let’s look at five ways your chatbots can achieve this.

1. Assist website visitors

Optimization is about improving customer experience, and what better way than automating customer service? Because of the speed and precision, businesses use chatbots to handle customer interactions on autopilot at scale.

Chatbot automation provides instant responses to customer questions, directs them to relevant pages, and assists them in completing purchases. It also reduces wait times, eliminates human error, and connects to an agent immediately.

2. Collect customer feedback

The only way to keep optimizing the conversion rate is to know the customer’s experience. And for this, you need to ask them. Chatbots can collect customer feedback at the end of every conversation to understand their experience and use this data to improve it in the future.

What makes chatbots an efficient tool for collecting customer feedback is the process is simple. Users don’t have to fill out a long form to share their feedback. Instead, they have to click on a couple of options, like giving a star rating or a thumbs up and down. Because of this, chatbots have had more success collecting feedback than any other channel.

3. Personalize the customer experience

Chatbots integrate with different tools to provide personalized experiences. By integrating with tools such as customer databases, CRMs, MarComs, payment gateways, etc., businesses can tailor customer communication specific to their needs. These communications consider individual customers’ preferences, demographics, previous choices, chat history, etc.

With these integrations, chatbots can help customers find the right solution or information at the right time, leading to satisfied users, higher conversions, and more business.

4. Streamline the checkout process

If there’s one place where businesses lose customers, it’s at the checkout process. Users want answers to many questions before making a purchase. Some of these include details on delivery time, shipping costs, payment methods, offers, etc. And if they don’t find these answers, they invariably abandon the cart.

Chatbots can help users convert at this stage by streamlining the checkout process. It can answer all of the above questions for the users and guide them through the process. Moreover, if a user has abandoned the cart, a chatbot can send a message asking them to complete what they started.

5. Provide post-purchase support

If chatbots are good at one thing, it’s at providing support. Post the user who bought a product or a service, a chatbot can help onboard the user, guide them on how to use the service, answer their questions and even troubleshoot a technical issue if the customer faces one.

Furthermore, chatbots can proactively identify potential issues and notify users ahead of time. It helps reduce customer frustrations, improves their experience, builds brand loyalty, and increases customer satisfaction.

Examples of CRO Chatbots

Now that we’ve learned how chatbots are CRO tools let’s look at some real examples.

Kia

Car provider, Kia, uses a Facebook Messenger chatbot to increase their sales conversion rate. The chatbot (Kian) asks for user information and generates a 21% conversion rate—3x more conversions than their website, which has only a 7% conversion rate.

The chatbot uses AI to understand customer intent and answer their questions accurately and instantly. And it doesn’t stop there. When the chatbot sends a follow-up message to the user, it gets a 24% response rate. All this at no extra cost of additional sales representatives.

The chatbot is improving the conversion rate by engaging visitors in meaningful conversations and driving business results better than their website can.

Duolingo

Practice makes perfect, which couldn’t be more accurate when someone wants to learn a new language. Duolingo, the world’s leading language learning app, knows this all too well. But due to a beginner’s embarrassment, users seldom practice. Duolingo uses an AI-powered chatbot app to nudge users to overcome this hindrance.

There are a few chatbot features that are helping Duolingo drive action from users. First, it’s available 24×7. That means they can practice their language no matter where they are or when they log in to the app. Second, AI makes the interaction natural and interactive. It removes the monotony that comes with a predefined script and encourages users to return for more.

Amtrak

Travel is one industry where customers need instant answers. Moreover, it’s an industry that doesn’t sleep. So when a user visits the website during non-business hours, it loses that opportunity to convert. But not Amtrak.

They’ve enabled a chatbot called Julie to help site visitors plan a holiday, book reservations, and navigate the website to find what they are looking for. Customers can visit the website anytime and from anywhere, interact with the chatbot, and take action in a single window. It has led to 30% more revenue per booking and 8x ROI.

How to implement CRO Chatbots on your platform?

CRO Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in customer service, marketing and sales. They allow businesses to automate interactions with customers and prospects while offloading contact center teams to lower costs and increase operational efficiency. But more than ever, they drive users to take action.

Chat360 is a no-code installation that allows businesses to quickly install and deploy CRO Chatbots on their website, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. Companies can customize their bots to their specific needs, allowing them to respond to customer questions quickly and accurately. By doing this, they can minimize customer wait times and provide immediate responses and increase customer satisfaction.

Businesses can integrate their CRM, eCommerce stores, email services, and payment gateways to instantly access existing customer data and better serve customer requests quickly. With its intelligent AI, the chatbots can also hand over the chat to an online agent.

Chat360 also allows businesses to use the platform for sales purposes, such as generating leads, increasing conversions, reducing sales cycles, and boosting sales. Marketing teams can enhance customer experience and improve their pipeline, generate quality leads and retarget audiences with personalized messaging. This helps businesses create deeper customer engagement, build long-term relationships, and deliver improved ROI.

Learn more on how to get started with Chat360 here.

Conclusion

Chatbots are a popular tool for CRO. They can use them to automate customer service tasks, collect data, and encourage interactions with customers. Chatbots provide a variety of benefits to businesses that use them for CRO.

Firstly, chatbots save time and money by automating mundane tasks. Additionally, businesses can use chatbots to prompt customers to take actions such as subscribing, filling out forms, and completing purchases. Finally, chatbots can collect valuable data about customers’ preferences, buying behaviors, and feedback. This data can be used to tweak the customer journey, retarget them with a relevant message, and make changes to the website to increase the likelihood of conversions.

In short, chatbots offer businesses an easy and effective way to optimize their conversion rate and increase customer satisfaction.

Further, read:

How to use Chatbots to collect and improve CSAT?

How to use chatbots to collect and improve NPS?

WhatsApp cloud API vs On-premise API

WhatsApp is everyone’s beloved chat app. We love to connect with our friends and family through its ergonomic chat UI. Its global popularity has also led the parent company Meta to introduce its WhatsApp Business suite, which includes the free WhatsApp Business app and WhatsApp Business API.

While the free mobile app is best suited for small businesses, the WhatsApp API is built for enterprises. It allows larger organizations to connect and interact with multiple users at scale.

Earlier, Meta offered the WhatsApp Business API through its chain of Business Solution Providers (BSPs), but the recently launched Cloud API has revamped the accessibility.

Determining which would be the best API for your business communication plan can be difficult, particularly when deciding between the On-Premise and WhatsApp Cloud APIs. Each option has advantages of its own, but choosing well requires knowing how they differ from one another. 

In this blog we will walk through the main features of each API, their advantages, and the particular situations in which they might be superior to one other. Whether you value cost-effectiveness, control, or scalability above all else, by the end you’ll know more clearly which API fits your business demands.

What is WhatsApp Cloud API?

WhatsApp offers a cloud-based messaging service called the WhatsApp Cloud API that enables companies to include WhatsApp’s messaging features into their apps without requiring on-premise infrastructure. Because of thos WhatsApp’s servers host this API, it can be easily deployed and managed, negating the need for complicated configurations.

To diversify its API usage, Meta eventually launched the WhatsApp Cloud API. Unlike the regionally hosted version of the business platform, WhatsApp Cloud API allows businesses to send and receive messages using WhatsApp’s cloud servers.

WhatsApp Cloud API uses Meta’s proprietary Graph API, which is the key way to get information in and out of the Facebook platform. Since the Cloud API is Meta’s patented service, businesses don’t need to worry about updating and maintaining the API.

The Cloud API has simplified the accessibility of the Business API. Now, most small and medium businesses can use the cloud-hosted version on top of their WhatsApp to seamlessly connect and interact with their users. 

While it’s a much more accessible option of the Business API, the Cloud API may pose some integration and automation limitations. This is mostly because, the Cloud API is a fairly new offering, and not every third-party vendor has solutions built to suit the API.

What is WhatsApp On-premise API?

In terms of WhatsApp On-premise API, businesses can host WhatsApp’s messaging features on their own servers. With this configuration enhanced control over data, adaptability, and adherence to regulations, making it perfect for businesses with particular security or regulatory needs. 

The On-Premise API offers unmatched control and customization, but it requires more resources for setup and maintenance than the cloud-based solution. 

WhatsApp On-premise API is one of the two hosting options available to businesses to use WhatsApp Business’ extended capabilities. It uses the REST API protocol using JSON data formats.

Businesses using the On-premise API need to host the API software on their own servers or on their BSP’s servers. On-premise API works better for much larger organizations with extensive customer communication needs.

5 Key Differences Between WhatsApp Cloud API and On-Premise API

Built to let businesses easily send and receive messages with users, both versions of the API have their pros and cons. Therefore, understanding the key differences between WhatsApp Cloud API and On-Premise API is essential for choosing the right solution for your business.

Let’s understand the difference between WhatsApp Cloud API and WhatsApp On-premise API.

1. Deployment and Maintenance:

WhatsApp’s servers host the Cloud API, which is simple to set up and requires little maintenance. While on the other hand, WhatsApp On-Premise API, gives companies more control over their servers but also requires more complicated setup and regular maintenance.

2. Accessibility to businesses

The top difference between WhatsApp Cloud API and WhatsApp is the method to avail both of them. Cloud API is Meta’s direct offering, which requires no intermediary. And so, it can be set up through Meta in the shortest time.

Whereas, the On-premise API must be availed through a WhatsApp BSP. The BSP works as the middleman to provide access to the comprehensive WhatsApp Business API.

3. Investment and costs involved

When comparing the two, WhatsApp Cloud API might be a more cost-effective choice for businesses of most sizes with realistic communication needs. If you choose the Cloud API, Meta will cover the hosting costs for you. You will only be required to pay per message sent or conversation held.
Whereas, the WhatsApp On-premise API depends on the BSP through which you’re availing it. In this case, you or your BSP will bear the costs of setup and maintenance. Businesses also follow the same message sent/conversation charges.

Meta follows conversation-based pricing which is categorized on two grounds:

  • User-initiated conversations
  • Business-initiated conversations

4. Messages per second throughput

The On-premise WhatsApp Business API supports throughput of 250 messages per second (MPS). Whereas, the WhatsApp Cloud API supports 80 messages per second, sent and received combined. Cloud API users can also raise a ticket with Meta to upgrade their throughput to 500 messages per second.

5. Certificate management

Certificate Authority (CA) is an organization that issues digital certificates to authenticate content sent from websites and servers. WhatsApp API users hosted on the premise are required to manage their own CA certificate and webhook authentication certificates.

Cloud API users, on the other hand, have their CA certificates handled by Meta directly. It’s wise to note that your Webhooks server must support HTTPS with a valid CA-chained TLS/SSL certificate installed to receive your Webhooks CA certificate.

Comparison between WhatsApp cloud API vs On-premise API

Differences Cloud API On-premise API
Hosting Through Meta Through BSPs
Upgrade and maintenance Features are automatically updated and maintained by Met Businesses and BSPs bear the responsibility for periodic updates/maintenance
Costs Involved No extra costs to maintain data servers. Only have to adhere to conversation-based pricing Set up costs borne by businesses/BSPs. Also, have to abide by conversation-based pricing
API protocol Graph API Rest API
Message throughput Max limit of 500 messages per second, which combines sent, and received, including media messages. 

 

High server load may also result in lower message throughput

Send up to 70 text messages per second for single-connect.

Send up to 250 text messages per second for multi-connect.

Sending media messages may reduce these numbers.

Certificate management Meta manages CA certificates. Individual business and/or BSP responsibility to manage Certificate Authority (CA) certificates and Webhook CA certificates
Media Provider API Deprecated Supported

Benefits of WhatsApp Cloud API for Modern Enterprises

It is essential to have a scalable and dependable communication platform in the lightning-fast commercial world of today. Simple to use and packed with functionality, the WhatsApp Cloud API is a strong choice for modern businesses. The Cloud API offers the following main advantages, which make it a great option for companies wishing to improve their messaging capabilities:

  • Cost-Effectiveness: The Cloud API eliminates the need for heavy upfront investments in hardware and infrastructure. With no need for server maintenance, businesses can reduce operational costs while still enjoying a powerful messaging solution.

  • Scalability: As your business grows, the Cloud API scales effortlessly with it. Whether you’re managing a small team or a global enterprise, the cloud-based solution can handle increased messaging volumes without requiring significant changes to your infrastructure.

  • Ease of Deployment: One of the standout features of the Cloud API is its simplicity in setup and deployment. With hosting managed by WhatsApp, businesses can integrate the API quickly without the need for extensive technical resources, making it ideal for companies looking to get up and running swiftly.

  • Global Accessibility: The Cloud API is hosted on WhatsApp’s servers, ensuring reliable performance and availability across different regions. This is especially beneficial for businesses operating in multiple countries or with a global customer base.

  • Automatic Updates and Security: The Cloud API is regularly updated by WhatsApp, ensuring that your business always has access to the latest features and security enhancements without the need for manual intervention.

Advantages of WhatsApp On-Premise API for Enterprise-Level Control

The WhatsApp On-Premise API is a strong option for businesses whose communication strategies place a high value on control and customisation. There are major benefits for your business when you host the API on your own servers. The following are the main advantages of the On-Premise API for businesses:

  • Data Control: Hosting the API on your own servers gives you complete control over your data. This is crucial for industries with strict data privacy regulations, ensuring that sensitive information remains within your organization’s control.
  • Compliance: The On-Premise API allows businesses to meet stringent regulatory requirements more easily. With control over data storage and processing, companies can ensure compliance with local and international data protection laws.
  • Customization: The On-Premise API offers extensive customization options, allowing businesses to tailor the messaging solution to their specific needs. Whether it’s integrating with existing systems or adding custom features, the flexibility of the On-Premise API makes it ideal for enterprises with unique requirements.
  • Security: Managing the API on your own infrastructure, you can implement advanced security measures tailored to your organization’s needs. This ensures that your messaging platform remains secure from potential threats.
  • Integration with Legacy Systems: Enterprises with existing legacy systems can benefit from the On-Premise API’s ability to integrate seamlessly. This allows for a smoother transition and consistent operation across all business functions.

Which WhatsApp API is Right for Your Business?

The ideal WhatsApp API for your company will depend on your long-term objectives, technological capabilities, and particular requirements. While there are clear benefits to both On-Premise and Cloud APIs, the best option will depend on your unique needs.

Let’s discuss them in detail:

  • Small to Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs): If your business is looking for a cost-effective, scalable, and easy-to-deploy solution, the WhatsApp Cloud API is likely the better option. It’s ideal for SMBs that need to get up and running quickly without investing heavily in infrastructure. For instance, a growing e-commerce company could use the Cloud API to manage customer inquiries globally, benefiting from automatic updates and robust scalability without worrying about server maintenance.
  • Large Enterprises with Specific Requirements: For companies that require extensive customization, control over data, and compliance with strict regulations, the WhatsApp On-Premise API is the way to go. Consider a financial institution that needs to adhere to stringent data protection laws. The On-Premise API allows them to manage their data internally, ensuring compliance while customizing the platform to integrate with their existing systems.
  • Hybrid Approach: Some businesses might benefit from a hybrid approach, using the Cloud API for certain applications while maintaining the On-Premise API for areas requiring higher control. This strategy allows companies to optimize both cost and functionality.

How Chat360 can help your business

You can easily incorporate either WhatsApp API into your business processes with Chat360. Chat360 offers the resources and assistance necessary to guarantee a seamless implementation and functioning, customized to your company’s requirements, whether you go for the On-Premise API due to its control and customisation or the Cloud API because of its ease of use and scalability.

Schedule a free demo today!