5 Innovative ways to use WhatsApp for Business Growth

WhatsApp has managed to get itself positioned alongside the big three (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) as a fourth essential platform for customer engagement. The numbers simply cannot be ignored - over 2 billion active users from around the world, and WhatsApp India’s revenue is likely to cross $1 billion this year.

Businesses now are not looking at simply adding WhatsApp as one of their channels, but also at how to make best use of it. WhatsApp chatbots, WhatsApp for Business app, payments, inventory and other tools are already quite commonly used.

In this post, we’re going to share with you what else you can do with WhatsApp for business growth. These are tools that will help your customers find you, engage them with interesting content, qualify sales leads, automate responses to customer queries, and offer seamless logins without OTP for your existing customers.

1. WhatsApp login as a Service, without OTP.

   SMS messages sent are categorized as transactional and promotional messages. In the former category, a business will often be required to verify the customer’s number, such as through a one-time password (OTP). This is commonly done by banks for financial payments, and also by all kinds of businesses when a user is required to log in to their platform, app or website.

   This can now be done using WhatsApp authentication without your users or customers having to enter a username and password, or having to send an OTP. Reducing this one step improves the user experience, and results in increased conversions.

2. ChatGPT on WhatsApp.

   ChatGPT has become such a hit that their servers are jammed with queries, and you have to get in line with yours. If you want to leverage the conversational ability of OpenAI to answer your customers’ questions, you can get the code here on Github, and here’s a video that explains how to make use of it.

   This would help ensure that customer queries are responded to instantly, and it works better than the commonly used WhatsApp chatbot flow logic and menu.

   The example below shows how much more information ChatGPT can provide, compared to your own business.

3. WhatsApp lead qualification.

   Learn more

   Call centres, business development representatives or sales teams that get lead lists usually end up calling the lead or emailing them, as a start.

   You don’t actually have to do this now, because leads can be qualified using multi-channel automation.

   On WhatsApp, you can send a message with a link or brochure, request a reply.

   It’s fairly simple to configure a WhatsApp Business account to respond to replies from your leads.

   You can set up a WhatsApp chatbot for this on your business account, and also use the WhatsApp for Business API to integrate it with a third-party tool that picks up responses.

4. WhatsApp business directory.

   Get yourself listed in the WhatsApp business directory (may not be available as yet in your region). Until now, your customers were finding you via search or social media, and then having a conversation with you on WhatsApp.

   Now Meta wants both the discovery and post-sales payment processes to happen on WhatsApp, so you have 2 billion potential customers (over 400 million in India) who are WhatsApp users and may be looking for a business near them.

   How to get your business listed in the WhatsApp business directory? Read the eligibility and application process here.

5. WhatsApp polls and surveys.

   To create a poll on WhatsApp, you can follow the steps outlined here. It serves as a way to engage your leads and existing customers. Getting their feedback on relevant issues is also a good way to learn what your customers think, which can help inform your product development.