Using WhatsApp Business to Enhance Customer Experience in a Contact Center

WhatsApp has become a must-have communication channel for businesses. With more than 2 billion active monthly users and 175 million users sending messages to business accounts on a daily basis, it’s not hard to see why. 

WhatsApp Business allows companies to interact with their customers in a more convenient way. The application helps companies ensure customer communications are seamless and timely. 

WhatsApp Business is especially useful for contact centers, which deal with a lot of customer interactions on a daily basis. Let’s explore why you should consider adding WhatsApp Business to your toolkit.

The Transformation of CX

Customer needs, expectations, and demands are rapidly changing and businesses must do what they can to adapt and stay ahead of the curve. In a digital world, customers expect businesses to offer them a plethora of options when it comes to service. The days of simply offering just a support hotline are long gone. 

Today, consumers want personalized experiences and the ability to interact with businesses anytime, anywhere. They are connected at all times with high-speed internet connections and mobile phones—so they expect businesses to be connected the same way. 

Many customers actually expect to be able to communicate with companies across at least 10 different channels. In addition, When communicating with companies, 33% of consumers and 45% of business buyers prefer to use messaging apps (like WhatsApp) to do so. Instant gratification through direct messaging is the new norm. 

How Does WhatsApp Business Work?

WhatsApp Business offers a lot of unique features to help organizations connect with their customers at a time that is convenient for them, whether it’s in real-time or with delayed responses for less urgent matters. The application allows business users to automatically sort messages based on the type of inquiry and urgency. Businesses are also able to have a personalized business profile on the app and can label chats and messages to make them easier to locate and respond to in a timely manner. 

With WhatsApp Business, companies can also use automation to reply to customers with automated greeting messages. Companies can also integrate the app with different CRM systems and softwares in their toolbox. This allows teams to create unique experiences for customers with customized messages and offers. 

In a world where convenience is king, you can’t afford to overlook any new technologies that may help you become more favorable to your customers. 

Meeting Customers Where They’re at with Interconnected Digital Experiences

Customers want interconnected digital experiences that allow them to connect with businesses simply and seamlessly on their time. Waiting on hold for hours on end just isn’t acceptable anymore. 

Time is just as valuable to your sales, customer support, and customer success agents, who need to switch between several different tabs and apps to respond to customer queries. 

A study by  Harvard Business Review analyzed 20 teams across multiple industries and found that one switch between different applications took just over 2 seconds, but the average employee switched between different apps and websites about 1,200 each day. This adds up to 4 hours per week that these employees spent just switching between tasks. 

Think about how many different tabs your own team may have open to handle just one customer interaction. How much time might they be losing by switching between them?

Streamlining Customer Interactions with WhatsApp Business 

By including WhatsApp Business as a communication method for your business, customers will no longer be limited to contacting you exclusively via a phone call or email. In addition, your agents can boost productivity by responding to more customer queries in a shorter amount of time with built-in automated responses. 

This raises an important question. Isn’t this just yet another tab or app your agents will have to open, amounting to more time flipping between tabs to manage different conversations? Not necessarily!

Omnichannel contact center solutions can help. You can simply add an integration for WhatsApp Business to your suite rather than having another tab open for the WhatsApp platform. Omnichannel contact center solutions bring all of your customer interactions together in one place to give you a single dashboard view of each customer journey.

With contact center solutions, agents should be able to view every interaction with a specific customer, regardless of which channel was used. This is important, as 69% of customers expect a personal and consistent customer experience regardless of the platform. 

Sometimes however, integrating your different software systems together is easier said than done. There are security updates, API changes, and management processes to navigate. But contact center solutions like uContact by net2phone can manage this easily.  

Integrating WhatsApp with Your Contact Center Solution

Using WhatsApp Business has many benefits from giving your customer base another channel they can use to interact with you to providing your agents with more flexibility throughout their workday to respond to customers either in real-time or later on. What’s more, adding this software to your contact center solution doesn’t need to be complicated. 

uContact allows teams everywhere to integrate all touchpoints and channels into one to create a unified inbox. Check out uContact to learn how and book a demo today!