How To Generate Leads Using WhatsApp Business Chatbots And Live Chat

WhatsApp is hugely popular the world over and most of us use it multiple times a day to stay in touch with friends and family, and increasingly, to interact with businesses. The Middle East is certainly not immune to its popularity, indeed there are over 30.45 million active users in Saudi Arabia alone. Leaving us in no doubt about how much potential there is for businesses in the region looking to leverage this remarkable market penetration.

Thanks to the richness of features now available on WhatsApp for Business, you can now convert your website visitors, chat users and social media followers into customers more easily than ever.

With well-planned integration and intelligent chatbot design in combination with live chat, WhatsApp for Business can help you generate high-quality leads and encourage prospects to reach out to you. Here are some ideas to help you generate leads using WhatsApp Business chatbots and live chat.

Get your business set up and verified on WhatsApp Business

First things first - it may seem obvious but this is something that is missed more often than you might think. In order to get the most out of the WhatsApp for Business features, you’ll need to register and verify your business with WhatsApp for Business and make sure all your business details and contact information is always accurate and up to date.

Place a WhatsApp chat widget on your website

Adding a prominent and easy-to-identify WhatsApp Chat Widget on your website indicates to visitors that someone is always available to handle queries through a platform that they know and trust. More and more website visitors are starting to use chat features as the first port of call for resolving queries, even before browsing through the inner pages. If your WhatsApp chat is powered by a well-designed custom bot that can field questions effectively and hand over to live agents when required, it can be a fantastic asset to your site and can quickly convert a casual visitor into a good prospect or even a paying customer.

By integrating WhatsApp with your internal sales and customer service functions through the WhatsApp API, chat users can easily be directed to the best department to handle their queries and can even access their purchase history so they can get straight to the point with the agent helping them out.

Real-time lead qualification with chatbots

Spending time customizing and configuring a rules-based chatbot running on WhatsApp for Business can enable your organization to qualify leads in real time and trigger an action from your sales teams once a certain set of criteria is met. For example, a chatbot can lead a prospect through a series of questions about their requirements, take their contact details, and if their requirements match your offering, can automatically trigger a call back from your sales team. Alternatively, the chatbot can hand over to a live agent who can take them through the next steps. 

Through the WhatsApp for Business API, you can integrate a WhatsApp chatbot with your CRM or other back-end systems to create a fully automated lead qualification pipeline.

Use your customer’s preferred language

In a region like the Middle East where dozens of languages are spoken by a varied and cosmopolitan population, the ability to communicate in the language of your customer’s choosing can really differentiate you from the competition.

If you’re lucky enough to have agents who speak all the languages your customers and prospects use, then a menu in your WhatsApp-enabled live chat can connect customers with a suitable agent. If not, you can also configure and customize a chatbot to invite a user to start typing in their preferred language and then provide pre-programmed answers in that language, or even translate on the fly for an agent typing in their own language. With AI constantly improving your ability to translate, you’ll be able to provide equally great customer service regardless of your visitor’s language of choice.

Collect leads even when you are offline

Not available 24/7? No problem. A WhatsApp for Business-powered chat widget on your website can field queries, qualify leads and handle routine issues at any time of the day or night.

As we’ve seen previously, a chatbot can be fully customized to act as your organization’s representative even if no one is around to personally deal with the customer. It’s perfectly possible to take customer details, ask pre-qualification questions, arrange callbacks, or even take orders without ever having to speak to a live agent. Once a chatbot is integrated with WhatsApp API into your systems, is customized to ask and answer the right questions, and can verify user identity, the possibilities are almost endless. When your teams login in the morning, a list of pre-qualified leads to contact or orders to fulfill can be waiting.

Engage users when they are leaving your website or abandoning their cart

According to research carried out in 2022, as many as 82% of e-commerce shopping carts are abandoned before a purchase is made. That’s an eye-opening statistic but also an opportunity for businesses to find out more about why customers may not be following through with a purchase.

Not all websites are transactional but all should have clearly defined goals of what you want visitors to the site to do. That may be making a purchase, but it could just as easily be filling out a form or making a phone call. Whatever your website goals are, WhatsApp Business chatbots can be a useful tool to help you learn why goals are not being reached.

By configuring a chatbot to contact the visitor as soon as they are about to leave the website or abandon their cart, you can prompt them for their feedback, suggestions, and questions. You might also like to offer a reward such as a discount code or a promotion to encourage them to participate. Gaining feedback like this can be extremely valuable in streamlining your website and your processes to hit more of your goals.

Offer an easy route to a phone call

Chatbots are a great customer service tool for your website, your instant messaging apps, and your social media channels but they are not the be-all and end-all of customer service and lead generation. Despite recent advances in chatbot sophistication, many people will still prefer the personal touch that comes with a phone call. As a business that cares about customer satisfaction and generating as much new business as possible, you’ll want to cater to that section of your website’s users too. 

By offering the chance early on in your chatbot workflow to request and schedule a call-back, you can make sure your sales staff and customer service teams are well optimized by calling people that want to be called at a time convenient to them. 

To wrap up

WhatsApp is the world’s favorite social media platform for internet users between the age of 16 and 64. It’s a powerful tool that has many features that can help you generate high-quality leads at a comparatively low cost. By integrating WhatsApp chatbots into your web chats, social media, and instant messaging, you can gain some impressive advantages.

For more information about how Unifonic can help you realize the potential of WhatsApp for Business and the WhatsApp API, get in contact with us.