Best Ways to Use WhatsApp Business for Your Brand

WhatsApp might not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about customer support. But trust me when I say that it’s brilliant.

Here are three examples of companies that are currently using WhatsApp to that end:

Decathlon

The retail store has dropped its phone and email customer support almost entirely in favor of WhatsApp.

This led to an overall decrease in average handling time by around 50%, and a 98% reduction in response time by agents.

Agents are now able to offer immediate customer service to multiple clients almost instantaneously because WhatsApp is very fluid and allows multitasking

2. Bankia

Bankia is a bank in Spain that has long since begun using WhatsApp for its customer support. Its motto is “it’s that simple,” and what could be simpler than WhatsApp for customer service?

They managed to create an automatic customer support system on WhatsApp that works brilliantly and offers instantaneous information to users. They also appear to have three times the engagement on WhatsApp vs. other customer support channels they’re using.

3. Racc Mobility Club

RACC is an insurance behemoth, so whatever they do is well-planned out and improved to perfection. They have over 1.1 million insurance cases per year and they chose WhatsApp to offer customer support for their entire brand.

Just like Bankia, Racc created an automated support chatbot based on WhatsApp that lets clients share photos, locations, and other important info related to their insurance claims.

This has led to a 70% decrease in overall case handling time, a 20% call reduction, and an overall automation of 48% of all claims.

Around 80% of adults agree that messaging is preferable to any other method of communication with a business. This means WhatsApp and other messaging services.

Not only that but around 5 million businesses are using WhatsApp to talk to customers, and 80% think that it helps their business grow.

Interested yet? Then, let me explain how you can use WhatsApp to provide the best form of customer service to your clients!

Use the WhatsApp Business API

The secret to WhatsApp customer service for a brand is switching to the WhatsApp Business API. It’s one thing to create a personal WhatsApp account and talk to your customers that way.

But it’s entirely different to have a professional brand WhatsApp account, a verified business profile fit with a phone number, address, and so on. It makes your business look more legitimate, trustworthy, and professional, and these things matter a lot.

Furthermore, WhatsApp business lets you showcase the following elements to your customers:

Social media handles
Contact information
Business address
Website link
Product/service catalog
Working hours

The WhatsApp Business API gives you several advanced features that will improve the customer experience substantially. It gives you a shared inbox, centralized dashboard, detailed reports, and advanced automation options for large businesses to scale their customer support.

The WhatsApp Business API is free but there’s one catch – the messages are charged per session in a conversation-based pricing model.

A WhatsApp conversation is a 24-hour message thread between you and a singular customer. WhatsApp uses this pricing model based on four types of conversations:

Utility – Notifications, confirmations, or updates are given to a customer about a transaction, shipping, or purchasing notifications
Service – Resolving customer issues or answering questions
Marketing – Promotions, offers, CTAs, or informational updates sent to customers
Authentication – Helping users with one-time passcodes for authentication purposes

The good thing is that every WhatsApp Business account receives a total of 1,000 free service conversations per month on all the business phone numbers associated with the account. Attention – utility, marketing, and authentication conversations are not free.

As for the pricing model, I’ll include it in the table below:

Country	Marketing Conversation	Utility Conversation	Authentication Conversation	Service Conversation
Argentina	$0.0618	$0.0408	$0.0367	$0.0316
Brazil	$0.0625	$0.035	$0.0315	$0.03
Chile	$0.0889	$0.0586	$0.0527	$0.0454
Colombia	$0.0125	$0.0085	$0.0077	$0.006
Egypt	$0.1073	$0.0687	$0.0618	$0.0644
France	$0.1432	$0.0768	$0.0691	$0.0859
Germany	$0.1365	$0.0853	$0.0768	$0.0819
India	$0.0099	$0.0042	Unknown	$0.004
Indonesia	$0.0411	$0.02	$0.03	$0.019
Israel	$0.0353	$0.0188	$0.0169	$0.018
Italy	$0.0691	$0.042	$0.0378	$0.0386
Malaysia	$0.086	$0.02	$0.018	$0.022
Mexico	$0.0436	$0.0266	$0.0239	$0.0105
Netherlands	$0.1597	$0.08	$0.072	$0.0891
Nigeria	$0.0516	$0.0319	$0.0287	$0.031
Pakistan	$0.0473	$0.0253	$0.0228	$0.0142
Peru	$0.0703	$0.0419	$0.0377	$0.0179
Russia	$0.0802	$0.0477	$0.0429	$0.0398
Saudi Arabia	$0.0406	$0.0252	$0.0226	$0.0195
South Africa	0.0379	$0.02	$0.018	$0.0168
Spain	$0.0615	$0.038	$0.0342	$0.0369
Turkey	$0.0109	$0.0093	$0.0083	$0.003
United Arab Emirates	$0.034	$0.0198	$0.0178	$0.019
United Kingdom	$0.0705	$0.0398	$0.0358	$0.0388
North America	$0.025	$0.015	$0.0135	$0.0088
Rest of Africa	$0.0225	$0.016	$0.0144	$0.0363
Rest of Asia Pacific	$0.0732	$0.0472	$0.0425	$0.0224
Rest of Central & Eastern Europe	$0.086	$0.0619	$0.0557	$0.025
Rest of Latin America	$0.074	$0.0494	$0.0445	$0.0423
Rest of Middle East	$0.0341	$0.0198	$0.0178	$0.0218
Rest of Western Europe	$0.0592	$0.042	$0.0378	$0.0397
Other	$0.0604	$0.0338	$0.0304	$0.0145

For middle-sized and even larger-sized businesses, this should come as a no-brained given the effectiveness increase of customer communication.

WhatsApp Business has also quadrupled its monthly active users in the 2020-2023 period, with over 200 million users using the API every month in 2023.

Let me also show you the increase in the number of WhatsApp Business downloads worldwide between 2018 to 2022:

Period	Number of Downloads
2018	37.87 million downloads
2019	98.82 million downloads
2020	170.46 million downloads
2021	210.09 million downloads
2022	283.51 million downloads

The number of downloads grew by almost 7.5 times in those four years, revealing just how popular and effective WhatsApp Business is. Its API allows you to customize your customer support services based on a multitude of factors, with automation options included.

Provide Customers with Real-Time Information

The second piece of advice I have for you is to offer real-time notifications and messages to your customers. Nothing comes even close to this feature when it comes to customer satisfaction.

With traditional customer options like email, the customer has to:

Open their email
Enter your email address
Fill in the subject line
Explain their problem and send the email
Wait for a reply from your customer team

Even with on-site support forms, it’s all the same. Customers never receive real-time notifications and replies. And that’s always a bummer.

WhatsApp Business’ messaging paradigm would change the game, literally. A customer would be able to send you a text and receive a reply in real time from one of your customer agents.

Moreover, with the API, you can customize automated notifications to be sent to your customers. I’m talking about things like:

Payment updates
Order status, shipping status, and ETA for arrival
Appointment confirmations and follow-up reminders
Notifications for a successful account creation
Customer greetings
Reservation notifications
Notifications about website problems

There are lots of templates to choose from, and you can naturally customize them to match your business and niche branding.

These types of real-time notifications are the secret sauce to building trust with your customers as a brand, especially if they’re accompanied by real-time customer support.

The best type of customer support is:

Quick and easy
Real-time
Human
Helpful and knowledgeable

WhatsApp Business gives you all the tools to provide these four pillars and build around them to foster brand trust in the healthiest way possible.

Automated “Quick Replies” and Labels

Another aspect of WhatsApp Business is that it allows you to build templates for pretty much anything. And these act as Quick Replies to customers who want answers to basic questions like “how much does this cost?“.

The “Quick Replies” function allows you to pre-set certain replies or upload certain documents/images to the chat with a simple button press.

Here are a couple of examples:

Sending a welcoming message
Communicating about delays during product delivery
Asking your customers for feedback or review
Answering FAQs on your services or products
Notifying your customers about products that you added back to stock
Contacting your customers about discounts and/or refunds

With “Quick Replies“, you’ll take your customer support system to a new level by being present when your customer needs you. The brand-customer communication relies on availability, trust, honesty, and professionalism, after all.

You can also label and segment your customer based on the type of communication you’re having with them (refunds, discounts, FAQs, and more).

This helps you organize your customer lists, and chats, and provide a more effective customer experience for your agents.

You can use color-coded labels and mark them with several names like:

Payments
High priority
Resolved
Pending
Renewals
Pending
Discounts
Refunds

Anything you want, basically. This way, you won’t be dealing with a cluttered inbox and you’ll always be on top of your customer support game. Once you’re done with a request, label the chat with a “Resolved” label and you’re done.

These labels also let you send messages to those chats specifically. Let’s say you want to send a discount offer to specific customers. Label them with a “Discount” marker and send the discount only to them. It’s that easy!

Do you offer products/services internationally? Then, you might want to label customers based on their country. Sub-labels are also a thing, and you can combine them however you want to!

There is a limit of 20 labels on WhatsApp Business, though. So, be intelligent about their usage!

Stats and Brand Analytics

Another reason for choosing WhatsApp Business for your customer support is because it offers real-time stats and analytics about your communications.

There are basic metrics like:

Number of read messages
Number of sent messages
Number of delivered messages

These will help you understand customer behavior and how to best construct your customer support tactics and train your team.

There are monthly insights on select conversations or all conversations, depending on your choice. You can also get specific insights into the different conversation categories (utility, authentication, marketing, etc.)

Automated Chatbots

WhatsApp chatbots work 24/7, for free, without ever complaining, and will always be there when the customer needs it. Indeed, they’re not a replacement for human interaction but they’re better than nothing.

International customers might send a message at 3 AM in the dead of night, and you might not have any agents working that late. That’s where the chatbot comes into play.

They never sleep and they can keep on working non-stop. You can also customize the chatbot to send lists and buttons (the customer needs to select specific options for the chatbot to offer personalized assistance).

Buttons are as simple as they sound. The chatbot will present the customer with several buttons, depending on the customer’s input and issue.

Interactive buttons are a new addition to WhatsApp Business, and they’re even better than lists. You can use them as CTAs or as quick-to-spot options for what might interest customers the most. For instance, a “Contact Us” option makes the chatbot offer you the official email address of your business.

Automated chatbots are absolutely indispensable if you’re serious about growing your business quickly and efficiently. They’ll build trust with your customers much faster as well.

Share News and Updates

A good usage of WhatsApp Business API is to share updates and news with your customers. These can be about new products you’re introducing or any marketing campaigns you’ve started that might interest them.

Of course, this means you’ll need to get your customer’s consent before you start sending promotional messages. There are strict privacy laws against unsolicited promotional messages. In fact, bothering your customers without their consent might make you lose them forever.

Once you get their consent, though, it’s time to get started. Make sure you only send valuable and worthwhile messages that they’re interested in.

Since you can use labels to send customized messages to particular clients, I’d recommend opting for a more personal approach. Don’t send general ads to everyone because you’ll hit and miss more often.

Plus, your customers will eventually unsubscribe if you’re not sending them offers they like.

Giveaways are wonderful opportunities to get leads and attract customers to your brand. You can connect your WhatsApp Business account to social media ads, for instance.

Once the customer clicks on the ad, a WhatsApp chat box will open and present them with the promotion or giveaway details.

Another way you could interact with customers is by sending interesting information like videos and blog posts. It would be even better if those blog posts would be hosted on your site. This provides additional value to your customers and they’ll see you’re not just sending them meaningless ads.

Get Reviews from Customers

Remember what I said about chats being a much more easy-to-use and accessible communication method? You should rely on this aspect to request product reviews from your customers through WhatsApp.

This would be done through a chatbot, of course. The structure would look something like this:

Greetings
Thanks for choosing us
We’d like to know what you thought about this product you bought
To leave a review, reply to this message

It’s really easy, simple, and accessible. The customer doesn’t have to access an external webpage to leave a review or log in. They’ll just send the message in the same chat box.

Naturally, you can use these reviews as social proof on your social media platforms. This will create even more leads and drive sales up significantly. It all works together to bring your brand more clients!

Use WhatsApp Widgets to Attract Customers

Yep, widgets, you heard me right. WhatsApp Business allows you to install WhatsApp-specific widgets on your website. The WhatsApp plugin from the Ecwid App Market is what you need.

With it, you’ll be able to connect your website to your WhatsApp account seamlessly. Your customers will be able to inquire about shipping and return details, opt for return/refund notifications, or ask to inquire about an issue.

You can add WhatsApp chat buttons or a “Contact Us” button that leads to WhatsApp on your website. WhatsApp updates (which can include anything) are also another useful widget.

I would say that these WhatsApp widgets are at least 50% of the reason you should consider the platform for your customer support system because they’re extremely effective and they offer the customer a pleasant experience.

In the end, that’s what you want, right? For the customer to feel welcomed, attended to, and understood. You want them to trust you and believe you care about their issues.

Get Referrals Through WhatsApp

Referral marketing is as old as humanity itself because it relies on the most impactful strategy method ever invented – word of mouth.

Think of it this way – who are you going to believe when inquiring about a product, your best friend or the business selling the product?

Most likely, you’ll prefer your friend’s feedback because you trust them more. And they have no reason to lie to you.

This is how referrals work.

You can create a referral campaign on your site which you then share via WhatsApp, among other platforms. The campaign can entail anything – a gift card, a discount, or even a cash-back offer. Once the customer receives the customer signs up, they can share their referral link with their friends.

Everyone benefits especially you. And WhatsApp sits at the center of these campaigns given how much more casual it is compared to other communication methods like email or social media.

That’s all I can say about WhatsApp Business and its API. I hope you can make an informed decision based on the data I gave you.

See you on the next one!