In fact, WhatsApp has over 2 billion users around the globe.

But did you also know that you can automatically chat with your customers via WhatsApp? That you can have one-on-one conversations with your customers, at scale?

If you didn’t, it is possible.

And in this article, I will explain what WhatsApp chatbots are, why you need to use them, and how you can create one yourself using Xenioo.

What is a WhatsApp Chatbot?

A WhatsApp chatbot is an automated conversation partner on WhatsApp.

Usually, when you chat on WhatsApp, you are chatting with another person. But with chatbots, this is different. Because you are not talking with another person, but with a computer.

The benefits of a WhatsApp Chatbot

Because you can automatically talk with your (potential) customers, you can have one-on-one conversations, at scale.

This means that your chatbot can have personalized conversations with each one of your users and it could be talking to thousands of people at the same time.

So, what are the benefits of such a WhatsApp chatbot?

First of all, a WhatsApp chatbot can have a significant impact on your customer service. For example, you can drastically reduce your customer service costs. Your customer service probably handles a lot of standard questions every day and it is proven that 80% of these questions can be easily answered by a chatbot. Besides, your chatbot can reply in seconds to customers’ questions instead of hours (or even days). Moreover, your chatbot is always available. Instead of using live chat where a customer needs to wait on an available live chat agent, you can use a chatbot that is always ready to respond to questions.

Secondly, you can boost your sales by using a WhatsApp chatbot. With a chatbot, you can directly sell your products to your customers and let them pay via the chatbot. Think of it as like an eCommerce store inside your chatbot. Another way would be to promote your products and services via the chatbot.

The third benefit of chatbots is that they can automatically qualify your leads, which is especially useful for B2B companies. In most B2B companies, there are some qualification rules to determine whether a lead could become an actual client. They ask questions like:

• What industry are you in?
• How many employees does your company have?
• What is your role inside the company?

But often these questions are asked by humans. But why would you not automate this? The chatbot can ask these qualification questions and if the lead is qualified, he/she will be forwarded to a sales agent (that can close the sale).

So in short, a chatbot:

1. Can have personalized conversations, at scale
2. Drastically reduce your customer service costs
3. Can reply to your customers in seconds
4. Is always available for your customers
5. Increase your sales
6. Automatically qualify your leads

Why WhatsApp is the best platform to engage users

So now we know why we need to use a chatbot, why should we put it on WhatsApp?

As said before, WhatsApp has over 2 billion users worldwide.

From these 2 billion users, 1.6 billion access the app on a monthly basis. This results in 65 billion WhatsApp messages that are sent on a daily basis.

With so many people on one channel, it is safe to assume that your customers are also using it.

And you need to be on the channels where your customers are.

Different types of chatbots

In general, there are two types of chatbots:

1. Standard-guided chatbots
2. Pure conversational chatbots

Or you can have a mix of both (probably the best way).

Standard-guided chatbots

Standard-guided chatbots are chatbots that are mainly based on rules. These chatbots often use buttons to guide the user to a specific part of a conversation. Also, the user often cannot talk freely to the chatbot, because the chatbot is not smart enough to handle it.

Benefits of standard-guided chatbots

• Good for qualification of leads
• Control of the conversation flow

Drawbacks of standard-guided chatbots

• Falls short when users want to ask questions freely
• Can lead to frustration

Pure conversational chatbots

Pure conversational chatbots are more advanced types of chatbots. They can understand the intent of the user and the context of the conversation, by using Artificial Intelligence techniques. With these types of chatbots, the user can ask anything they want, and the chatbot probably often provides a good answer or redirects the customer to a live chat agent.

Benefits of pure conversational chatbots

• More natural conversations
• Chatbot can understand the intent of the user
• Chatbot can understand the context of the conversation
• Users can ask more advanced questions

Drawbacks of pure conversational chatbots

• Higher costs, because of Artificial Intelligence techniques
• Development of the chatbot takes longer

Create your First WhatsApp Chatbot

So, now we know why we need to use a WhatsApp chatbot, let’s create one ourselves using Xenioo.

And as an example, we will create a chatbot for a Pizza restaurant.

First, go to the Xenioo console and log in with your account credentials.

(If you don’t have an account yet, you can create one here).

When you are logged in, you can click on Create New Bot:

This will automatically create a standard chatbot flow for you, which should look like this:

So, let’s start by editing the name of this flow to “Welcome Message” by clicking on the gear icon on the top-right corner. Then, you can just type in “Welcome Message” and hit Save: 

Before we are proceeding, I recommend that you already create three chatbot behaviors in Xenioo. You can do this by clicking on the Add new behavior icon in the top-center:

What are these chatbot behaviors? These are for:

• Ordering a pizza
• Making a reservation
• Showing the menu

Now, head back to the Welcome Message behavior and go to the Start Interaction. You can just change the text by clicking on the element and type in a new message in the right panel and clicking on Save:

Then, we need to make three buttons for the Order pizza flow, Make a reservation flow and Showing the menu flow.

We can do this by clicking on the gear icon of the start interaction and then clicking the Add new action: 

Here, you can select the Quick Reply Button:

Next, you can set the text of the button with Button Title and set the “Go To Operation”, which will move the conversation to another interaction:

NOTE: WhatsApp doesn’t support showing buttons. Instead, the buttons are shown as plain text as “If you want to go to the menu, type in 1”. 

Now you can do the same for the Making Reservation button and Menu button, so it looks like this:

Before we move on, I want to tell you about two awesome features of Xenioo regarding buttons.

The first one is called the “Alternate text”, which displays an alternate text for text-based channels (such as WhatsApp). 

So one a more visual channel (like Facebook Messenger), Xenioo will show the Button Title, but if you have set the “Alternate Text”, this will be shown on WhatsApp:

With this example, the button on Facebook Messenger will show ‘Menu’, while on WhatsApp it will show “See our menu”.

The second feature is called “Trigger Text expression”. Let’s say the user chooses not to use the buttons, but instead just types in “menu”. Then, your chatbot will break (because he is not familiar with that). This feature fixes that, so if the user types in “menu”, it will go to the appropriate flow:

Now, let’s first create the ‘easy’ flows: Make a reservation and showing the menu.

The Make a reservation flow is also pretty straightforward for this tutorial, just tell the user that they can make a reservation via a phone call or your website:

With the menu, we need to change the text and add the File Download action:

If you select this, you can set the URL of the your Restaurant menu:

So the Menu flow looks like this:

Next, we are going to do the more advanced part: Ordering a pizza.

Before we are going to deep dive into this flow, start by creating five interactions and name them like this:

• Check on toppings
• Check on size
• Pizza with topping and size
• Pizza confirmation
• Start over

You can do this by clicking on the Add new interaction icon in the top-center:

And naming them accordingly by just clicking on them and changing the Name:

Now, head back to the Start interaction of the Order pizza flow and start by asking a question:

NOTE: We will handle the response to this question later on in the NLP part, so don’t worry about that now

Next, we are going to set the actions for the “Check on toppings” interaction. This interaction will check whether the user has typed in a topping. If the user has filled in one, we will move on to the next interaction and otherwise, we will go back.

We can do this by selecting a Variable Switch as action (Under the ‘Flow’ section):

And check whether the topping has any value:

By the way, ‘topping’ is a variable name I created. You can just type in a variable name and click on “Add new variable” and Xenioo will automatically create it.

Accordingly, we need to determine what happens if the topping has a value. And we can do this by clicking on Add operation and select the Go To Bot interaction:

The Go To Bot interaction will redirect the conversation flow to the next interaction (Check on size):

But what happens when the user didn’t type in a valid topping? Then, they will go back to the previous question (using another Go To Block action):

With the next interaction (Check on size), we are doing a similar thing, but then we check on the size of the pizza, instead of the topping.

So, we will add a Variable Conditional Switch to this block that checks on the size:

If the size already has a value, we continue with the “Pizza with topping and size” interaction, and otherwise we are going to ask a question.

NOTE: Now, you might be thinking “Huh, but we didn’t ask for the size, yet?” That is completely true! We will cover this in the next section where we will handle the NLP part of our chatbot

Now, let’s create the question that asks for the size of the pizza. You can just add the Text action and type in “What size pizza do you want?”:

Then, we need to add three buttons for “Small”, “Medium” and “Large”, which all go to the next interaction. For each of the buttons, click on Add Operation and select Set User Variable (under Profile):

We can use the Set User Variable to change the variable size to small:

NOTE: Don’t forget to also add the Go To action, which makes sure the flow goes to the next interaction (“Pizza with topping and size”)

Now, you can do the same for the Medium and Large buttons, so it looks like this:

Lastly, we need to ask whether the user is satisfied with the chosen toppings and size of the pizza. You can do this by adding a Text action and two buttons for Yes and No.

Afterwards, you can connect the buttons to the right interactions. If the user is not satisfied with the pizza, the chatbot can start over again by connecting the “Start over” interaction with the first interaction.

Because we already covered all the things you need to know to do this, I assume you can handle this yourself

Here is the final flow of the Order pizza behavior inside Xenioo:

Use NLP to make your chatbot smarter

What we’ve created now, is what you would call a standard-guided chatbot.

But, as you might remember, we still need to handle the input for the toppings and size of the pizza, so that people can just type in what pizza they want.

We can do this by using the NLP feature of Xenioo. 

Thus, let’s start by creating an intent. An intent is an action your user wants to do, such as ordering a pizza. So let’s create an intent for exactly this.

In Xenioo, you need to go to the AI section and then click on Add intent:

Here, you can type in the name of the intent and click on Save:

Next, we need to give the chatbot certain training phrases, so it knows when this intent is triggered. You can do this by just typing in phrases and hitting Enter:

Then, we need to make sure that the chatbot understands the difference between a veggie pizza and a mozzarella pizza. We can do this by using entities. 

Entities are useful facts the user is saying, such as the size of the pizza or the kind of topping they want. In Xenioo, you can just click on one of the words and tell Xenioo it is a size:

And you can do the same for toppings:

You can extend these entities, by going to the Entities section, click on the three dots and choose for “Edit”:

Here, you can extend the entity values. For example, for topping you add more toppings, such as:

• Beef
• Sausage
• Bacon

And we can also do that for the size entity:

But, how are we sure that this is actually working? By using the Train & Test feature of Xenioo. You can just type in a sentence and Xenioo will give you the matched intent and entities:

There is just one last thing, how do we use this inside our chatbot flow?

Go back to your Order Pizza behavior and choose for the Start interaction. There, insert a new action called NLP Input (under Input):

Then, you just need to make sure that if it matches the Order Pizza intent, that it automatically goes to the “Check on size” interaction:

Chatbot Fallback: What to do if the chatbot doesn’t understand the user

But what happens when the chatbot doesn’t understand the user?

Then, you need to make sure that there is a human that can ensure a good user experience.

And I have written a full guide on this, that you can read here.

Deploy your chatbot on WhatsApp

Now we’ve created our complete WhatsApp chatbot inside Xenioo, we can deploy it on WhatsApp.

And Xenioo does provide a lot of direct integrations with WhatsApp service providers.

One of them is Kaleyra Cloud, which is the one we are going to use in this tutorial, and one of those providing WhatsApp Business API integration.

So, if you don’t have an account on Kaleya Cloud yet, I recommend you to create one. 

First, we need to go to our chatbot in Xenioo and click on Publish:

Here, you can choose for WhatsApp (Click on Settings under WhatsApp):

Then, we can select Kaleyra Cloud as our provider:

As you can see, we need some information of Kaleyra to get this to work, so let’s get it.

If you log in at Kaleyra, go to Developers and click on Create API Key:

Then, a pop-up opens and you can give it a title and click on Save:

If everything went good, you must get the following confirmation:

NOTE: I recommend to click on “Download” to make sure that you have stored your API key securely (we need this in the next steps).

Next, we need to go to Channels → WhatsApp → Click on Manage:

Then, choose for Configuration and click on Add number:

Here, you need to specify the number you are going to use on WhatsApp and the incoming URL (which is the “Hook URL” inside Xenioo):

Then, if we go back to Xenioo, we need to fill in our:

• Sender phone number
• API Key
• Account SID 

If you have done this, you can click on Save:

And that’s it! Now, your chatbot is working on WhatsApp!

How it looks on WhatsApp

And here is how it looks on WhatsApp:

That’s it

That’s it! That’s how you create a basic WhatsApp chatbot with Xenioo.

Next article we’ll continue with that basic chatbot enhancing it with new options and make it ready for production.

Have any comments or would like to discuss Xenioo and chatbots?

Join the Facebook group and let us know!

The post How to create a basic WhatsApp Chatbot appeared first on Xenioo.

A lost conversation is when a user leaves before signing up for your service or completing the questions you’ve prepared.

How can we get back to the user sometimes later to try to reconnect? Let’s read on and learn how you can easily do it with Xenioo.

First interaction to improve Chatbot Conversion Rate: “Hello? Is There Anybody Out There?”

One of the first options we can use to get back to our users is a broadcast. A broadcast is basically a scheduled push that can be set to be sent to a specific time, date and time or even on demand.

Let’s consider a very simple chat flow like this one:

This flow, on Whatsapp (as an example) lead to a conversation like this:

After this, our user leaves the conversation. Since we want to detect these cases, the first thing we need is a way to check if the user has passed our question. We are using a tag action for this and changing the flow as follows:

Basically what we are doing is set a WAITING_ANSWER tag before the question and remove it right after. This way we know that if a conversation has a WAITING_ANSWER tag then the user is waiting at the input, otherwise the flow has completed and we’ve our email.

Setting Up Your First Broadcast

What we need to do now is create a broadcast that now and then checks for all users that still have the WAITING_ANSWER tag and contacts them to check back. Using broadcasts you are basically creating a “Scheduled Task” that your chatbot can execute every specific interval.

To reach our goal we can easily create a On Interval broadcast that loops every 1 hour and is directed to only a specific audience, like in the picture below.

Since we don’t want to check back to all users every hour we make sure to create and select a specific user that can be quickly generated using the Broadcast Audience Creator. The resulting filters will look similar to this:

Once the basics are down we can move to the Design section of the broadcast, where we can lay down the part of the flow that handles the reconnection. The broadcast design is identical to the general chatbot design and in fact, you can do here everything you can do in your normal chatbot.

After saving (and enabling!) the broadcast we can go ahead and test our reconnection with our previous conversation. When the time you’ve chosen for your broadcast is triggered, Xenioo will automatically send your message to the user.

At this point our user is back in the game and its again up to us to re-engage the conversation so that it is lead to our desired conclusion.

Wait! We can do Better to improve our chatbot conversion rate

While our previous example is simple and effective, it has a couple of flaws that will become very clear as more users are reached and more time is spent online by our chatbot.

1. The broadcast is executed at a specific time, regardless of when the user abandoned the conversation. A user that left the conversation 5 minutes ago would be contacted together with someone who left it an hour ago. It would be better to have a relative time for every single user.
   
2. After the broadcast, there’s no way for the user to go back to the flow that was executing. Even if we get back to the user we’re not moving back to the question that is important for us.

Let’s address point one immediately by simply changing our broadcast type on-flight: from a simple On Interval, we switch to an On Trigger one.

On Trigger broadcasts are one-to-one user broadcasts that are triggered by a specific user action. While audience rule are still applied to this broadcasts only one user will be receiving it based on its conversation triggers.

For example, for our bot, we can select a trigger that starts 20 minutes after Last Interaction. This configuration means that after 20 minutes from the last time a user wrote something the trigger will start. This is just perfect for us because it’s exactly what we need. If our user goes idling for more than 20 minutes we go and try reviving the conversation.

“On Trigger” broadcasts are always targeting a single user in a single conversation but you can still use audiences to filter for a very specific user variable or tag so that even if the broadcast is triggered it is not sent.

What Was The Question Again?

Our second bullet point is little trickier but still very doable.

What we need to do first is split our flow into two parts like below:

We have basically moved all but one action to another interaction and linked them with a Go To Action. All of this can be done very quickly by simply dragging and dropping the desired contents. It has only one purpose: to have a single, repeatable interaction to be invoked later by our broadcast. We will see very soon why.

In our broadcast, we are changing the flow so that the user can be asked if there’s still a chance to complete our flow and if the answer is yes we can now redirect to the Ask Email interaction.

The user will see again the question (which is fine as we’re giving some context to the request) and will be back from where the conversation was left.

This is how our final conversation may look like:

A much better result. User is reconnected with a brief interaction and the chatbot is capable of reconnecting back to where the user left. A good user experience overall and a good way of pushing to all your idling contacts.

If you look at the conversation it now becomes clear why we did the initial split into two interactions. We can now redirect the user to the initial step of the question. And repeating the brief explanation text that gives context to the question.

I Wish I Had Just One Question Like You!

Yes, of course! Chatbots are rarely a matter of just one question and if you have more than two, or three? Or twenty? Having so many questions may make building this kind of approach really difficult.

But once again, we have a neat solution.

For any case when you need to redirect to a dynamic point in the conversation that you really don’t know beforehand you can use a bookmark action.

A bookmark action will basically put a bookmark (how unexpected! ;)) on the current interaction. After the bookmark action is executed you can use any Go To Action to redirect there in any part of the flow.

Lets expand our initial example to a more complex one. With multiple questions, we could design our chatbot to be something like this:

As you can see, the flow isn’t actually much more complex. It is just a bunch of questions one after another but we have now added a Bookmark action on top of each interaction. Now we know exactly where the user is stuck.

The change in our broadcast design is even easier.

All we need to change is the tiny Go To option from “Absolute” to “Bookmark”. What will happen is that Xenioo will automatically redirect the user to the last dynamic bookmark position.

And that’s it! We have now our full reconnection flow with personalized followup and dynamic question redirection. Now we are ready to boost our lead generation and improve our chatbot conversion rate.

Time Is Of The Essence

Privacy settings and platform-specific limitations may be stopping your reconnection plans. Reconnecting with users after a long while may catch them by surprise in an unpleasant way.

Some platforms like Telegram or WhatsApp will not stop you from doing so. But others like Facebook may try to ban your page for attempting mass contact outside of Message Delivery time windows.

Improving chatbot conversion rate: Wrap up

We just did a deep dive into some of the most interesting features of Xenioo and we saw some tips to improve chatbot conversion rate.

In this post, we’ve been highlighting both its power and flexibility. You should now have the basics for adapting your chatbot flow and create an even better chat experience.

If you are not sure about the best way to check back to your users or how to create a chatbot like this or even how to comply with different platform’s rules, feel free to contact our team at team@xenioo.com or leave a message on our Facebook Group.

The post How To Increase Your Chatbot Conversion Rate appeared first on Xenioo.

Whatsapp è in effetti la piattaforma di messaggistica più comune ed utilizzata al mondo. Gestisce milioni di utenti attivi ed ha il potenziale per diventare la più efficace piattaforma di marketing e supporto clienti.

In questo articolo vedremo come è possibile creare e pubblicare un chatbot completo e funzionante per Whatsapp utilizzando Xenioo.

Creare il chatbot

L’approccio alla creazione di chatbot con Xenioo può essere definito come “design first”(“progetta prima”).

Infatti, non è mai richiesta la selezione della piattaforma di destinazione fino al momento della pubblicazione. Questo implica che si può creare il chatbot una volta sola e pubblicarlo simultaneamente su diverse piattaforme.

Allo stesso tempo questo significa anche che è possibile creare parti di flusso e contenuti dinamici differenti in base alla piattaforma sulla quale il chatbot verrà eseguito.

Non ci sono limiti al numero di casistiche che è possibile costruire.

Fantastico, vero? Questa modalità di progettazione vi consentira di pensare fin da subito al business model del vostro chatbot e solo successivamente effettuare gli adattamenti necessasari e specifici per ogni canale che vorrete supportare.

Cosa fare e cosa non fare

Canali differenti supportanto tipologie di contenuti differenti ed in modi differenti.

Whatsapp è una piattaforma prevalentemente basata su chat testuale e supporta un numero inferiore di funzionalità rispetto ad altre piattaforme come Telegram oppure Facebook Messenger.

Per esempio, Whatsapp non supporta alcuni elementi tipici dei chatbot, come bottoni, caroselli e liste. Questi elementi, se inseriti in un chatbot Xenioo, verranno visualizzati correttamente quando il chatbot verrà usato per esempio su Telegram, ma verranno nascosti nella conversazione su Whatsapp.

Per evitare che durante la progettazione si utilizzino dei componenti non supportati da questo o quell’altra piattaforma, dovrete dare un occhio alle piccole icone che troverete in alto a destra del pannello di configurazione di ogni azione: è sufficiente posizionarsi sopra l’icona con il mouse per poter vedere una descrizione dettagliata del supporto per quella piattaforma specifica.

Come avrete notato, alcune icone sono rosse mentre altre sono arancioni. L’icona rossa indica che l’azione non è supportata dalla piattaforma, mentre l’icona arancione indica che ci sono alcune limitazioni o comportamenti diversi.

Tenete presente che tutte le azioni “non visuali” di Xenioo, come quelle per le integrazioni o la NLP, sono perfettamente supportate da ogni canale senza limitazioni, Whatsapp compreso.

Pubblicare il chatbot su Whatsapp

Quando il vostro chatbot sarà pronto per essere pubblicato, potrete procedere con la fase di attivazione del canale Whatsapp.

Come potete vedere dall’immagine sottostante, la configuarazione del canale è piuttosto semplice.

Vediamo nel dettaglio cosa significa e come impostare ogni campo della configurazione del canale Whatsapp.

1) Service Provider

Xenioo supporta Whatsapp attarverso l’utilizzo di fornitori esterni del servizio (Service Provider). Questa lista verrà aggiornata da Xenioo periodicamente per integrare nuovi fornitori oppure nel momento del rilascio delle API ufficiali di Whatsapp. In quest’ultimo caso, Whatsapp sarà integrato nativamente con Xenioo.

La connessione tra Xenioo ed i Service Provier è completamente trasparente verso chi utilizza la piattaforma ed è possibile cambiare da un fornitore all’altro senza ripercussioni sulle funzionalità del chatbot.

Al momento Xenioo supporta i fornitori elencati nella tabella sottostante.

Ogni fornitore offre differenti vantaggi a costi diversi. La tabella sottostante mostra un breve riassunto delle caratteristiche offerte da ciascuno dei fornitori supportati.

Provider di API WhatsApp “non ufficiali”

Fornitori di API WhatsApp Business

Nella scelta del provider sarà necessaria la valutazione dei costi e delle funzionalità che ogni Service Provider mette a disposizione.

Maggiori dettagli riguardo l’uso e la configurazione dei Service Provider di Whatsapp nella nostra guida online.

I Service Provider sono servizi indipendenti da Xenioo e con la quale Xenioo si integra per supportare l’esecuzione dei chatbot su Whatsapp. Il team di Xenioo è disponibile per aiutarvi nella selezione del Service Provider adatto per il vostro chatbot.

2) Sender Phone Number

Questo è il numero di telefono associato con il vostro chatbot.

Non tutti i Service Provider hanno bisogno di questo numero, quindi impostatelo unicamente se è richiesto dallo specifico servizio che state utilizzando.

Xenioo escluderà ogni messaggio in arrivo che non sia diretto al numero specificato in Sender Phone Number, quindi è importante verificare che questo numero corrisponda esattamente al numero che il Service Provider visualizza nella propria pagina di configurazione come “integrated” oppure “connected”.

L’errata configurazione del Send Phone Number comporta una mancata ricezione dei messaggi e della conversazione del chatbot (non utilizzate caratteri come + oppure / per spezzare il numero, se questo non lo sta facendo il Service Provider).

3) API Key

Questo è la specifica chiave API del Service Provider selezionato.

Deve essere recuperata dal pannello di configurazione del Service Provider e copiata in questo campo.

E’ tramite questa chiave che si crea il collegamento tra Xenioo ed il Service Provider selezionato, e quindi dovrete essere sicuri di impostare esattamente tale valore.

4) Hook Url

Questo valore lo troverete già valorizzato e corrisponde all’URL Xenioo da impostare nel pannello di configurazione del Service Provider, ove richiesto.

Questo URL consente di creare il “ponte” tra il Service Provider selezionato e Xenioo ed è dove il Service Provider invierà in tempo reale tutti gli aggiornamenti per ogni messaggio spedito tramite Whatsapp.

Includere ed escludere numeri

Alcuni dei Serivce Provider supportati da Xenioo sono pienamente capaci di integrarsi direttamente con un vostro numero telefonico.

Questo è molto comodo perchè vi permetterà di non dover gestire un nuovo numero telefonico potendo riutilizzare viceversa un numero che già si possiede (potrebbe essere per esempio il caso in cui già si disponga di un numero per il supporto clienti che non si vuole cambiare).

D’altro canto potrebbe essere un problema se non si vuole che Xenioo prenda il controllo totale, grazie al chatbot, di qualsiasi conversazione avvenga su quel numero.

Per aiutarvi a gestire questa situazione, in Xenioo è stata aggiunta una comoda ed utilissima funzionalità che permette di configurare i numeri telefonici da includere oppure escludere.
E’ possibile specificare numeri completi oppure parziali utilizzando wildcars, come per esempio 0389* per indicare tutti i numeri che iniziano con 0389.

Per esempio, i numeri configurati come “da escludere” non faranno mai partire il chatbot associato vostro numero.

Gestire le conversazioni

Come per tutti gli altri canali supportati da Xenioo, anche ogni conversazione Whatsapp sarà resa disponibile all’interno della sezione Conversation del chatbot e sarà pienamente controllabile da voi o dal vostro team.

In ogni momento sarà possibile prendere in consegna (Take Over) la conversazione per poter chattare direttamente con l’utente dall’interfaccia di Xenioo.

Nel caso di chatbot per il supporto clienti oppure assistenza alle vendite, non è raro infatti dover intervenire direttamente con un operatore umano per sbloccare situazioni di stallo o aiutare in modo più preciso gli utenti in difficoltà.

Potenzia il tuo chatbot Whatsapp con Xenioo Forms

Xenioo Forms è una nuova funzionalità disponibile su Xenioo che consente la creazione di moduli di inserimento dati completamente personalizzabili.

Puoi utilizzare Xenioo Forms per rendere il tuo chatbot più semplice ed intuitivo, garantendo una esperienza di conversazione sempre migliore e coinvolgente.

Nel video seguente puoi vedere un esempio di come è possibile utilizzare Xenioo Forms per aggiungere la richiesta di feedback all’interno di un chatbot Whatsapp.

Allora, siete pronti a pubblicare il vostro primo chatbot per Whatsapp? Create ora il vostro account gratuito su Xenioo!

The post Come creare un chatbot per Whatsapp con Xenioo appeared first on Xenioo.

What’s more, in the right environment, chatbots can go a long way to building and growing your business: driving sales and generating brand loyalty.

WhatsApp is one of the best places for chatbot activity – for customers, WhatsApp is a trusted and very personal channel that’s conveniently available on the device they’re likely to be using all day long: their phone.

In this article, we outline how WhatsApp chatbots can keep your customers happy and directly drive sales. What’s more, WhatsApp bots also boost brand loyalty while saving costs too.

Let’s take a look.

What is a WhatsApp chatbot?

Most of us are already familiar with website chatbots – those convenient helpers that assist us with essential customer service questions right on a company’s website. Using a mix of pre-programmed routines and AI, website chatbots deal with typical queries quickly and efficiently.

WhatsApp bots are similar in nature but instead of hiding away on a website, a WhatsApp chatbot sits right on the device we all love – our mobile phone. This brings several advantages: WhatsApp chatbots are more personal, more accessible and more present.

This proximity to your customer brings a whole range of benefits – some common to chatbot use in the broad, some specific to WhatsApp chatbots.

How WhatsApp chatbot can benefit your business

The benefits of using WhatsApp chatbots are broad and deep, so we’ll divide these into four broad categories: direct sales growth, brand building, cost reductions, and customer satisfaction.

Grow revenue

A chatbot on your client’s mobile device is a great way to boost your sales revenue and there are plenty of strategies you can take to help you make the most of your WhatsApp chatbot.

1. WhatsApp for sales incentives

You can offer customers the option to buy throughout WhatsApp chats – whether they’re resolving a product query, answering a quiz or looking for some product information.

WhatsApp sales incentives could include a special discount that depends on a quick buy, or perhaps the opportunity to get some free goodies if your customer answers a quiz fully.

It could also include regular promotions sent straight to a customer’s WhatsApp, automated and closely targeted using your chatbot platform.

It’s a low-cost, effective way to reach customers on their device and you can fully track your promotions, just as you can do with email or online advertising.

2. Recover abandoned carts

It’s frustrating for businesses, but customers frequently drop off when shopping – abandoning a carefully picked shopping cart because they were distracted, couldn’t complete payment or for anyone of a host of other reasons.

With WhatsApp chatbots you can give your customers an easy way to resume their cart, keeping the items they need or even topping it up. Just send a quick WhatsApp message once it’s clear a shopping cart is abandoned.

The immediacy of WhatsApp provides an excellent opportunity to ensure customers successfully complete a shopping task.

3. Offers across the product lifecycle

Many products warrant additional purchases over time, whether it’s an upgrade or an important accessory. You already have the data on what your customer purchased, why not harness this data to prompt your customers to continue shopping based on a product they already purchased?

Yes, you can launch offers through the product lifecycle by sending cleverly timed emails, but with email so easily ignored, you’re much better off using WhatsApp to exploit the lifecycle of a product.

It works for consumable products too – just ping your customer on WhatsApp to ask them if they need a top-up, all utilizing affordable and scalable automated chatbot technology.

4. Acquire new customers

WhatsApp is great for picking up new customers too.

Instead of directing prospects to your website or Facebook page, consider sending them straight to your WhatsApp chatbot. It gives you the opportunity to use interactive, cleverly timed WhatsApp conversations to build awareness with your customers.

In many ways, WhatsApp is a very personal method of engaging with prospective customers, certainly far more personal than Google Ads or relentless inboxing.

Your highly intelligent chatbot can interact with prospective customers, starting a conversation based on browsing history – all in the convenient location of your user’s handset.

Brand building

Clever marketers will know how growing a business is not just about a hard focus on new sales. Strong brands attract customers and brand loyalty retains customers.

The personal nature of WhatsApp chatbots makes these a great fit for brand building exercises.

5. Introduce your brand

So, when connecting with your customer on WhatsApp, remember: it’s not always about trying to make a hard and fast sale. Instead, use the conversational abilities of your WhatsApp chatbot to build a relationship with a potential customer.

Think of it as a different way to do content marketing – instead of publishing long blog pieces, use interactive chat to give away useful bits like recipes or travel advice, or to publish a fun quiz.

In essence, WhatsApp is a great way to drip-feed information about your brand.

6. Foster brand culture

You’ll know who your loyal customers are. WhatsApp can help you build very deep relationships with existing customers, encouraging ongoing sales and loyalty to your brand.

How? Your WhatsApp chatbot taps into the deep knowledge of your customers that already reside on your business systems to automatically initiate conversations are highly personalized: whether it’s offering a pertinent and timely tip or a complementary product offer.

7. Give loyalty programs a lift

Customers love loyalty programs – who doesn’t like getting free stuff, right? But there is one issue with loyalty programs: membership can quickly collect dust and be swiftly forgotten.

WhatsApp interactions are a great way to brush away the cobwebs.

For example, your WhatsApp chatbot can immediately notify a customer when they’ve earned loyalty points, or when their points are enough for a reward. Or, use your clever chatbot’s gamification capabilities to drum up interest in your loyalty program.

8. Utilize user-generated content

If you’re a user of WhatsApp you’ll know how easy it is to share content with other WhatsApp users.

Marketers will also know how powerful user-generated content can be. Why not use your WhatsApp chatbot to encourage user-generated content that you can use to build your brand?

Your chatty WhatsApp bot can encourage your customers to take a snap or upload a video that involves your product – or your experience. Next, review the content and share it with your other customers.

It’s a fantastic way to build your brand.

Save money

Chatbots are universally terrific at driving efficiency and cost savings. That goes for WhatsApp chatbots too, but in the case of WhatsApp, you can rely on even greater chatbot engagement delivering even bigger savings.

9. Reduce support costs

Dealing with routine queries such as “where is my shipment” or “why is an item missing” can easily soak up a significant chunk of time in the contact center. These questions are repetitive and predictable – and the answers often lie in existing business data.

Chatbots can automatically answer many of these questions and at an extremely low cost. It’s simple really: chatbots can be multiplied infinitely, so you can run countless concurrent chatbot sessions – and there’s no need to pay chatbots by the hour.

The cost savings are significant.

10. Increase employee productivity

Chances are you have many highly experienced support agents who are often caught up trying to answer really simple queries.

The result: customers with complex queries that need an experienced agent end up waiting in long queues before they get the help they need.

Your WhatsApp chatbot can help make your support staff more productive by taking care of the more routine queries.

Result: less expenditure on staffing, a boost in employee morale and less waiting time for customers.

Happier customers

Chatbots and WhatsApp chatbots, in particular, are also an excellent way to drive customer happiness. Personal, immediate and convenient: all qualities of WhatsApp chatbots, and popular customer service qualities too.

11. Notifications where they matter

Need to reach out to a customer via email? Good luck with that. In contrast, a WhatsApp notification is far more direct, and far more likely to get seen by your customer. Why? Because WhatsApp notifications are displayed in a place that matters a lot – your customer’s mobile device.

In practice, this means that it’s less likely that a customer will miss an important notification – it’s easy for a “delayed order” notification to get binned in junk mail.

In contrast, your WhatsApp notification will stick until dismissed, so customers won’t sit up waiting for an order that won’t arrive.

12. Customer service 24/7

Particularly for smaller businesses, running a 24/7 customer support operation can be prohibitively expensive, while extended support hours will be costly too.

Chatbots can’t deal with all customer service requests, but your WhatsApp chatbot can easily extend your customer support hours.

Chatbots don’t need sleep so you can use your WhatsApp chatbot to serve customer care requirements on a host of typical issues such as new orders, questions about shipment or basic product support.

It’s a great opportunity to improve your customer experience, at a low cost.

13. WhatsApp live agents

Don’t forget, using WhatsApp chatbots does not mean that automated conversations are the beginning and the end of your customer’s WhatsApp interaction. In fact, you can hand over a WhatsApp chatbot conversation to a life support agent.

It’s an important distinction because it gives your customers incredibly easy access to qualified live agents who can take care of even the most complex of issues – right on the customer’s mobile device.

14. Collect feedback and reviews

Understanding what your customers think is key to delivering improved products and services, and to stop growing problems from spiraling out of control.

However, collecting this feedback is tough – customers can be reluctant to fill out website forms.

The immediacy of WhatsApp makes it far easier to collect feedback.

A friendly chatbot can pose a few cheeky questions that encourage high response rates, reducing the effort to give feedback to the absolute minimum. Minimum effort means maximum feedback.

Why Xenioo delivers a top WhatsApp chatbot experience

Chatbot’s success is highly dependent on the software you’re using. It’s about the features and capabilities available to you and, of course, how well these features are implemented.

Xenioo’s chatbot platform reaches across chat channels – from your website, through to Amazon Alexa and of course WhatsApp. We think Xenioo does a top job on WhatsApp, thanks to our outstanding features including:

• Conversation handover. Every good chatbot knows there’s a time to hand over chats to a live operator. Xenioo makes this as seamless as possible so your human operators can easily dive straight into a WhatsApp exchange on your customer’s mobile phone.
  
• Support and supervision. Keeping customer service top-notch around the clock can be tough, but Xenioo’s built-in team supervision features solve this tricky issue. Xenioo makes it incredibly easy to ensure consistently good chatbot support day in, day out.
  
• AI technology. Chatbots work better when they can understand natural language. Xenioo chatbots harness artificial intelligence technology including natural language processing (NLP) to interpret typed inputs, delivering a far better chatbot experience compared to rigid menus and structures.
  
• Broadcast features. Reach a targeted audience right on their phone thanks to Xenioo’s Broadcast Behaviour. Send the latest news and offers straight into your customer’s WhatsApp client and comprehensively track the response metrics on your Xenioo console.

So, with Xenioo, your business can enjoy all the benefits of a WhatsApp chatbot. What’s more, you can publish your WhatsApp chatbot across to a range of other platforms too, with minimal adjustment.

It’s easy to get started with Xenioo – try out Xenioo for free, check out our tutorials or read up on what’s possible with Xenioo.

Want to know more? Just get in touch.

The post 14 Ways A WhatsApp CHATBot Boosts Growth and Customer Service – And Reduces Costs appeared first on Xenioo.