Is WhatsApp for Business API the ultimate answer to hyper-personalization woes?

By Girish Chaturvedi, Chief Business Officer, Netcore Cloud

Brands backed by a mature customer experience strategy are over six times more likely to exceed customer retention targets than those that failed to prioritize the customer experience.

Capturing, engaging, and delivering consistent experiences across all channels has always been crucial for brands. They are, therefore, constantly toiling towards enhancing their data-driven marketing efforts and personalising for customers at all touch-points.

WhatsApp Business API has surfaced as a renowned and efficacious strategy for achieving this among brands.

Originally perceived as a simple messaging app, WhatsApp has rapidly evolved into a super app in the last couple of years. With over two billion users across 180 geographies, the instant messaging channel has expanded a plethora of opportunities for brands to engage effectively since now the audience is one text away.

In fact, a couple of months ago, Meta successfully weaved the integration of Salesforce with WhatsApp Cloud API, playing exactly into the hands of what businesses need to stock their data.

Reports have also been buzzing about Mark Zuckerberg‘s increasing focus on the role that WhatsApp Business API will play in leading Meta’s overall growth in the days to come.

Apart from expanding reach, another astounding feature that will come to be is the ability to address queries in real time. This is expected to take the concept of Chatbots one step further.

While chatbots are generally kept close-ended, WhatsApp Business API will be more open-ended, taking the conversational style approach, which will add a much-needed human touch.

Brands can therefore offer consistency, friendliness, and digestible conversations by becoming more accessible and drastically improving the quality of engagement. Other benefits like better deliverability rates are bonuses, therefore, more conversions which is the end goal.

Making brand conversations “interactively conversational” with no-redirects

Empowered by the ability to share diverse asset formats – photos, videos, documents, voice notes, and locations – brands can seamlessly enrich the consumer’s overall experience based on their need.

With this level of hyper-personal approach and access, WhatsApp for Business API can also go one step further and challenge the idea of businesses having websites or apps.

This holds true especially since everything consumers need can be achieved within a single super app. Intrigued?

Presently, brands interact with customers in a non-seamless way, i.e., the customer gets redirected to the website to search, undertake a purchase, provide a review, or seek aftersale services. WhatsApp API will now facilitate businesses to have action-led conversations within the chat.

The entire website or app experience – everything from browsing through product offerings up to the final checkout page, including transactions – can directly happen within the chat. It can be as simple as texting a friend over WhatsApp to book preferred flight tickets, fix appointments or share feedback with a touch of a few buttons.

All this, either on the chat or by creating native apps within the app in the form of an additional tab, where consumers can explore by searching on the tab, selecting, and transacting, the possibilities are endless.

Shifting the lens from a promotional POV

In September 2021, WhatsApp opened its doors to businesses, allowing brands to send out promotional messages and advertise their products on its platform; since the super app has immense DAUs and garners a staggering 90% open rate on average.

However, with rising costs per message for brands, Meta is looking at shifting the focus of the platform to offering better utilities and services as against other advertising platform, where Facebook and Instagram are already hogging most of the limelight.

Utilities and services like booking a ride, hyper-local couriers, or shopping are all other possibilities that Meta is looking at, and making it possible to enable them over a few chat in-app messages.

Besides being cost-effective and time-saving, contextual conversations over WhatsApp will ensure better engagement, satisfaction, and retention with lesser human intervention.

Is WhatsApp for Business deemed to become the next Google?

Reimagining the future, Whatsapp for Business API is identifying ways to tap into a “pure play search.” Presently extended to users in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Indonesia, and the UK, WhatsApp for Business Search grants brands the ability to be searched for, within the chat, by their customers.

Ordering vegetables can be as simple as opening WhatsApp and searching for the desired app to conduct the entire transactional process without leaving the application, irrespective of your interaction with the brand in the past or not.

The implementation of this offers a massive benefit for businesses looking to use WhatsApp notifications as a connection tool to their end-users.

Brands today are defined by the overall experience they provide consumers. WhatsApp Business API surpasses expectations when it comes to seamless interaction and highly personalised engagement, and hence it isn’t surprising that brands are drawn towards it, and so are consumers.

In the days to come, other distant but practical applications of WhatsApp are deemed to be integrated with the power of AR and VR towards witnessing still further innovations.

The emergence of 5G is further expected to fuel this growth, and this is only the beginning.

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