Why do small and mid-sized business need Whatsapp to stay competitive?
The way we communicate with each other has significantly changed over the years. And with such evolving communication methods and customer preferences, it only becomes increasingly crucial to choose and leverage the right platforms for your business. This helps to effectively engage with your customers to succeed and stay ahead in a competitive landscape. WhatsApp is one such platform that can revolutionize the way small and mid-sized business connect with customers.
Are you a small or mid sized business, concerned about staying effectively connected with your customers throughout the marketing funnel and beyond? And still relying on outdated communication methods like phone calls and Emails?
Missed calls, Busy phone call lines, Overlooked emails in a clutter causing delayed or no response to customer emails, would frustrate your customers, eventually driving them to your competitors.
Imagine being effectively connected with your customers, following up with them, supporting and responding to them seamlessly and promptly keeping them engaged and satisfied. Isn’t this what every business strives for?
Stay tuned till the end of the blog to know how you can.
The challenge with conventional communication channels
According to Statista,
the three major causes of bad customer experience are
- Lack of effectiveness in support,
- Lack of speed,
- Lack of accuracy.
In today's fast paced environment, customers expect real-time communication to receive quick and personalized responses. If the current tools used by the small and mid-sized business are not resilient to handle and serve a high number of customer queries and inquiries at a given time, it can affect both you and your customers.
Did you know? According to the
state of connected customer Salesforce report
, Poor customer service experience can have significant consequences.
- 67% of consumers have shared about their negative experience to others.
- 65% of consumers have switched to a competitor.
- Over half of consumers (54%) will stop doing business with a brand after a single bad experience.
- 80% would switch to a competitor right after their first poor experience.
Conventional communication channels like Emails and phone calls have fallen short to meet the modern age consumer’s expectations of speed and personalized experience. This gap in your customer service can result in losing potential sales, dissatisfying your customers and might eventually even tarnish your brand reputation if no measures are taken to address the gap.
What should you look out for then?
The rise of live chat communication
Consumer behavior has drastically shifted over the recent years. People want to receive real-time, context aware and data driven response and support. With the widespread adoption of smartphones, live chat messaging apps have gained tremendous popularity and have emerged as powerful tools in revolutionizing the way people connect and interact. The modern age consumers are increasingly preferring these platforms for more convenient and prompt services offered through them.
As a business, it is important for you to have a presence where your audience is not just present but actively present. And what if you could transform your business with one such platform that is already a part of many of our daily lives? That is exactly where WhatsApp comes into play.
WhatsApp
is a cross platform instant messaging offering WhatsApp for mobile and WhatsApp for web applications that allow users to connect and engage globally through the internet.
How can WhatsApp help bridge the gap?
Global reach and connect
With WhatsApp available in many countries
(180 countries)
, it has grown significantly popular with a widespread user base of over 2 billion users. It has become a necessary communication platform more than just another social media app on your phone. Thus providing you an opportunity to utilize WhatsApp to connect with large audiences globally.
Ease of use
The widespread adoption of WhatsApp means that most of your customers are already familiar with using this platform. This makes it more convenient for you to establish WhatsApp as your platform for customer communication. It is also convenient for your customers to engage with your business using this platform as most of them already use WhatsApp for their personal communication.
Direct and Real-time communication
Don’t let your busy phone lines and overlooked emails stop your customers from reaching you. With WhatsApp, the communication is more direct and real-time as your customers can directly reach you instantly and vice versa. Be it answering your customer queries or providing support or sending updates, it can be done swiftly and efficiently with WhatsApp.
Personalized customer experience
Personalize customer experience by tailoring your messages to individual customer behavior and preferences. Personalized communication can help build stronger relationships with customer
Message history
As whatsapp retains the conversation history, this allows you to easily refer to your previous interactions with your customers. This enables you to be context aware while handling multiple customers thus providing a seamless experience even to your customers by not bothering them to repeat their questions and details multiple times.
Increased
engagement rate
WhatsApp as a communication channel has a comparatively impressive open rate of approximately 98%, which is higher than email marketing averages. And about 80% of the WhatsApp messages are read in the first five minutes of being sent. For business, the base open rate is 58%, higher than other conventional channels. By effectively optimizing your WhatsApp messages, you can significantly improve your customer engagement.
Cost-effective
Compared to other conventional methods of communication like SMS and phone calls, WhatsApp is cost effective for your business to connect and engage with your customers.
Rich media and interactive content support
Whatsapp allows various types of media, including texts, images, videos, voice notes, links, documents. This enables the business to provide interactive content for the recipient to interact with thus enhancing the overall experience.
End to End encryption
WhatsApp offers
end-to-end encryption
for messages and various privacy settings prioritizing user security and privacy.
What do these result in?
- Helps increase the efficiency of your customer communication.
- Helps enhance your customer engagement.
- Helps you foster much stronger and personalized relationships with your customers.
- Increased customer loyalty.
- By enhancing the overall customer experience, you can unlock the growth potential of your small or mid-sized business.
With such multiple compelling reasons to use WhatsApp as your customer communication channel for your small or mid-sized business, it is evident that this powerful, cost-effective and real-time communication channel meets the demands of the modern consumers as well. Incorporating WhatsApp as your primary customer communication channel has become a necessity for business to stay relevant, competitive and effectively connected with your customers.
Don't let outdated communication channels hold your business back. Harness the power of WhatsApp by integrating it into your customer communication strategy to enhance your customer engagement and ultimately drive growth towards success of your business.
Explore ChatZeal to experience seamless and effective WhatsApp communication management tailored for your business needs.
