WhatsApp Chatbot for Telecom - Rewriting the Rules of the Game
Gone are the days when consumers had to write lengthy emails to customer care departments or spend an infinite amount of time on calls with toll-free numbers. With concentration spans of consumers reducing at an alarming rate, businesses cannot risk keeping them waiting. Something more prompt and more effective is the desperate need of the hour.
And this is where chatbots come to the rescue!
Coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), chatbots have proven themselves to be the most cost-effective and efficient solution to enhance the customer experience of your brand.
Numbers Do Not Lie
Customers have got used to chatting socially on a number of social networking platforms. WhatsApp, the most popular messaging platform, now enables businesses to connect to the customer where it is most convenient to them – on WhatsApp. If numbers are to be believed, chatbots are completely shifting the industry trends and drastically overtaking the traditional forms of consumer engagement.
- The global chatbot market is projected to grow at 29.7% and reach $9.4 billion by 2024.
- According to Invesp, 67% of the consumers globally reported to have used a chatbot for customer support in the previous year.
- 90% of the customers surveyed by Text Savvy reported that they prefer to be contacted by message instead of a phone call.
- ChatBots Magazine reported that 69% of the consumers prefer chatbots over other customer care channels because of their ability to respond instantly to simple questions.
- 33% of the consumers in a study by Drift showed interest in using chatbots for doing more than just chatting with the business such as making reservations, placing orders and making payments.
- Tokopedia, the largest online marketplace in Indonesia, reported a 58% higher delivery rate of one time passwords through WhatsApp chatbots as compared to SMS.
What Makes WhatsApp Chatbots So Dear?
With 1.6 billion people using WhatsApp across 180 countries, it is hardly a subject of debate why WhatsApp is the most preferred choice for businesses to reach out to the customers. Over the years, WhatsApp has incorporated interesting features to make it lucrative for businesses and consumers alike. WhatsApp Business is available for small and medium-sized businesses through its Whatsapp Business app while the WhatsApp Business API is available for large-sized businesses.
Regardless of the variant, WhatsApp chatbot definitely is one of the dearest when it comes to choosing chatbots for business. Why? Here’s why –
- Enhanced Customer Experience – Customer experience is the deciding factor whether a sale is made or not. Better customer experience directly translates into higher sales figures and also increases the probability of repeat purchases. The fact that it also means better feedback for your business is a cherry on top of it all.
- Reduced Wait Time – With Whatsapp chatbots, you can reach out to the customers through their preferred mode of contact at any point of time and work on making their experience better without making them wait. AI enables bots to fine-tune the responses based on many factors such as customer’s answers and his account history.
- Reduced Costs for Business – Deploying humans round the clock to attend to customer queries incurs huge costs for your business. In industries like telecom, which tend to huge customer bases, the cost of running support services are tremendous. WhatsApp chatbot for telecom, on the other hand, are cost-effective and have a higher return on investments. Of course, they may not be able to replace humans completely, but at initial stages of customer interactions, chatbots are definitely a smarter choice. UK-based Juniper Research estimates that by 2022, businesses will be able to save up to $8 billion per year using chatbots.
- Flexibility and Scalability – WhatsApp chatbot for telecom is designed to be highly flexible. From simpler factors like the look and feel of the bot to very complex ones like its responses and the functions it will perform, chatbots can be customised to represent your business as closely as possible. Chatbots can scale up to support your growing customer base, respond to a huge volume of customer queries and handle various types of issues.
- Deriving Important Insights from Customer Behaviour – As chatbots interact with customers, they also collect important information for you like the amount of time spent by the customer on a product, the most common queries and how customers respond to specific suggestions. Using AI, these critical pieces of information and data can be tracked to enhance customer experience and boost sales.
Uses Cases of WhatsApp Chatbot for Telecom
The telecommunication industry caters to a huge customer base consisting of individual and corporate customers. Customer support service is the most important point of contact for this customer base.
Support services in the telecommunications industry are complex structures with various levels of technical assistance. They have to be robust and prompt to ensure that customer queries are resolved in the least possible time without aggravating the situation.
In the telecom industry, chatbots can do much more besides streamlining the purchase experience for the customer. Chatbots can work wonders to not only improve the performance of customer support but also keep the customer happy while interacting with the business.
Let’s explore how WhatsApp API, when synchronised with your business, can find more ways to enhance customer service in the telecom sector.
Acting as the First Line of Customer Support – WhatsApp chatbot for telecom can be configured to handle repetitive queries in the first line of customer support. Typically, customer support in telecom receives a huge number of queries on a regular basis, most of which are primitive and repetitive in nature. Queries as simple as “I can’t connect to a Wifi network”, “I need to top up to my existing plan” or “I need to change my data plan” take up most of the time of a customer support executive.
Deploying chatbots to respond to these queries not only makes sense for your business cost-wise but also ensures that your customers get an instant response instead of waiting for a representative to listen to them. While resolving customer queries, WhatsApp chatbot for telecom can also collect the basic information about the customers, which is readily available in case the query is passed on to a representative at a later stage.
Connecting the Customer to the Relevant Department – Not all queries can be resolved by chatbots, no matter how smartly they are programmed. Some of these queries might need human intervention at some level. WhatsApp chatbot for telecom can collect basic information about the issue and figure out possible causes of the problem.
Based on these inputs and the complexity of the query, chatbots can connect the customer to the relevant department for further resolution. This is more convenient for a customer than holding on to a call while figuring out the cause of the problem and then going through a set of steps that asks them to keep pressing random numbers to reach a certain department.
Multi-Use Message Templates – Message templates are pre-approved messages that can be used for inbound and outbound interaction with customers. These message templates can be used to reach out to the customers outside the customer care window if they have opted-in for the service.
The message templates can be designed to perform functions like reminding customers about plan expiration, prompting them to upgrade to a better plan, updating them about the change in plan tariff and order status, assisting them with payment issues, or informing them about a technical issue that might disrupt the service for some time. However, to use the outbound message template, taking customer consent through ‘opt-in’ is essential.
Customer Profiling and Lead Generation – WhatsApp chatbot for telecom collect basic information from the customers during their interaction. Using this information along with the customer’s usage pattern, qualified leads can be generated instantly.
Conversational chatbots are also programmed to pitch products and services that match the customer’s profile during the interaction. As the pitch is made seamlessly during the interaction and as a part of the on-going conversation, the customer does not feel overwhelmed by the sales push.
Collecting Feedback – Businesses have to evolve constantly to sustain. Feedback is the best possible way to find out where the business needs to focus, improve, and evolve. A WhatsApp chatbot for telecom is a smart and non-intrusive way to generate and collect feedback from customers.
The customer’s inclination to answer a few questions on a messaging window is higher, but he might not be willing to do so over a phone. The feedback can follow a recent interaction with a bot or after a purchase is made or even after a bill is paid. The responses collected from these feedbacks can be reviewed to streamline the processes even better.
Creating Databases – Information collected during the interaction with a chatbot is collated simultaneously to create critical and actionable databases. These databases are updated regularly with relevant changes during consequent conversations with the customers. When your sales pitch and product offering is based on highly specific information from these databases, they have a higher probability of conversion than random and generic sales offers.
Promotional Campaigns – WhatsApp chatbot for telecom can be deployed to roll out new promotional plans to customers. With one word responses to simple questions like “would you like to know more about it?”, you can get the customer to listen to the new product offering without spamming his phone. And all this at no additional cost!
WhatsApp Chatbot – Transforming the Telecom Sector
Although bots may not be able to replace humans in customer service and perform all the functions of an agent yet, they bring in a lot of convenience, both for the business and the customer. Especially in telecom, where the customers are looking for instant resolution and expect the customer support to be available 24×7, chatbots come to your rescue.
According to an Accenture report, a pilot chatbot project at a European telecommunication company was able to resolve 82% of the common queries by itself. Chatbots conversations, powered by AI and Natural Language Processing, can closely resemble an interaction with a human. The two-way conversational nature of chatbots makes them the most engaging addition to customer service.
The telecom industry is highly dynamic. As technology evolves, it generates not only new avenues for business but also throws new challenges for the businesses. Customer service and support are at the forefront to deal with changing customer expectations caused due to these changes in the industry.
WhatsApp chatbot for the telecom sector is a great way to connect to the customer at an early stage of interaction. The immense scope of bots makes them perfect to handle a huge volume of queries simultaneously and still be as effective and efficient as possible.
As customer-first approach becomes the mantra of companies on the path of success, organizations are realizing that WhatsApp chatbots indeed put the customers first by providing prompt response to their queries on a platform they already use – WhatsApp.
WhatsApp Business Chatbots allow you to streamline your business operations by dealing with incoming queries in real-time – which is crucial in the current market scenario to gain an edge over your competitors. Simply drop us a note at hello@marutitech.com to see how WhatsApp chatbots can help your business grow and retain customers in the long run!
