In recent years, chatbots have transformed into extremely useful tools that are increasingly being adopted by businesses to boost their engagement and enhance overall customer service and experience.
In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about a web chatbot and a WhatsApp chatbot, the merits and demerits of installing a chatbot for your digital business, and which chatbot between the two is a better option for your business.
Let’s get straight to it.
WhatsApp Business & WhatsApp API
2021 has been a year of risks and uncertainties. But what connected people and gave them hope from miles away was a messaging platform that facilitated a smooth and uninterrupted flow of communication, WhatsApp. This online application has effectively become a leader among all the other messaging channels in the world. Due to the pandemic and its social distancing norms in place, the application has witnessed a 40% surge in its usage as most of the conversations are taking place online. According to the company’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, the application delivers roughly 100 billion messages a day.
This enormous increase in its usage over the last couple of years has paved the way for many businesses to engage with their target audience in a more personalized manner than ever before.
WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Business – a free-to-download mobile application for businesses. The app helps you in interacting with your current as well as potential customers, highlight your products and services, and answer customer queries in a quick and efficient manner. With WhatsApp Business, you can easily create a catalogue to showcase your products and services and also use special features to automate, sort, and respond to customers’ messages.
WhatsApp Business API is another type of Business account that is best suited for medium to large scale companies for reaching out to their customers from all over the world on a fast and secure platform. With the API, companies can provide effective customer support and deliver customized notifications to customers based on their needs and preferences.
API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface, a software intermediary that enables two applications to talk to each other. Each time you use an application like Twitter, send an instant message to someone else or check the weather on your device, you’re using an API.
What Is a WhatsApp Chatbot?
WhatsApp chatbot is a computer program that is powered by rules or artificial intelligence (AI) and runs on WhatsApp. People can easily communicate with a chatbot through the chat interface, similar to interacting with a real person. It is a set of automated replies that simulates a human conversation and allows all types of businesses to reach out and respond to their customers on WhatsApp.
These conversational bots are integrated with WhatsApp Business API to answer questions asked by your customers. Most of the customer issues get managed in real-time through automated replies, while highly complex ones get transferred to human agents instantaneously so that they can tend to the clients on the same chat platform.
This is the reason why you can see businesses adopting WhatsApp business chatbot rigorously to increase their brand visibility, customer satisfaction, and overall engagement rate.
Advantages of WhatsApp Chatbot
Conversational chatbots create diverse opportunities for businesses to expand their customer outreach and deliver the finest quality of customer service and support. Below, you can find the benefits of a WhatsApp chatbot:
- Customers and clients can get their queries resolved instantly and initiate interactions with the business at any given time.
- The support from business stays available to customers 24×7.
- An AI-powered chatbot personalizes every conversation, which enhances the overall quality and value of every interaction.
- Business verification comes with end-to-end encryption along with identity and data protection which makes communication more secure than ever.
- Customers already know the functioning of WhatsApp and can find your business on a platform they are already using.
- The size of the business doesn’t matter as anyone can utilize the platform, from small and medium businesses to large organizations.
- Conversational chatbots enhance customer relationships to build brand loyalty and awareness which result in higher customer engagement and retention.
- Omnichannel WhatsApp chatbot unifies all your business touchpoints on the online platform.
- You gain the ability to broadcast news, notifications, and informational content in a personalized manner.
- Higher scope of globalizing your business at any point using the app’s wide reach and usability across the globe
- If required, an AI bot enables a human agent to take over the conversation on the same platform in case the queries are unresolved or highly complex.
- A chatbot can share location pins of your brand store to help customers reach your shop easily.
- Businesses can use the chatbot to conduct surveys and gather feedback from customers and clients to improve their services.
Disadvantages of WhatsApp Chatbot
While the WhatsApp Chatbot has a lot of aspects which add to its merit and functionality, there are still a few facets it has yet to overcome. Few of them are mentioned below:
- The inability to project emotions into conversations with customers, which may create distance and a sense of aloofness.
- It is difficult to create as it needs to be highly personalized according to the organization’s type of business and has to be programmed to attend questions according to those varying requirements.
- Chatbots have been designed to handle basic questions only and hence it may not be able to handle complex queries.
- It requires routine maintenance, review and optimization in terms of their knowledge base and the manner in which they are supposed to communicate with customers. For this, an analysis of each conversation with customers needs to be done and tracked in order to understand frequently asked questions and put an answer for each of them. This generally is a herculean task and requires extra resources from the company to keep a track of the whole process.
What is a Web Chatbot?
A Web chatbot, at its core, is designed to fulfil the same functionality as a WhatsApp chatbot. But the way it is programmed and the place of its implementation differs.
It is a chatbot assigned to a website which interacts with your website’s visitors, most commonly through a text interface. The purpose of placing a chatbot on your website can vary. You could deploy a chatbot that helps your visitors navigate through the site and find information about your product, or helps your visitors by answering their questions and offering upsell options and more.
Advantages of Web Chatbot
A webchat bot makes it a lot easier for a business to understand and help its customers who have visited their website with the added advantage of not having to employ humans, who they would have to pay, to do the job. Some of the perks of a Web Chatbot are outlined below:
- It is easy to integrate your Ecommerce solution through a chatbot to deliver a brand-new and improved experience to your users.
- A chatbot can be programmed to visually appeal to the business’ need and theme of the business website.
- It can automatically understand basic questions and give a report to the company for them to add an answer to those questions.
- It is more efficient at understanding complex queries and stringing multiple sets of queries together.
- Round the clock customer service support for customers and clients.
- If a human agent is available the chatbot will let them take over in the same chat window.
- The User Interface can be personalized to better tend to the needs and preferences of the target audience.
- It can effectively build credibility and brand trust.
Disadvantages of Web Chatbot
While a web chatbot is extremely helpful to both the consumer and the business, it is not without its own flaws. Some of the demerits of using a Web chatbot are given below:
- The chatbot loses all connection with the customer once they leave the website.
- The client has to willingly visit a website for that chatbot to get access to their requirements.
- It needs to be created by the business individually to cater to their website clients unless they use a third-party web chatbot for which they’ll have to give commissions.
- They have zero-decision making skills and lack human emotions, which are required in some situations.
- The initial cost to set up a web chatbot is quite high which a small business may not be able to afford.
- If a query, for which the chatbot isn’t trained, comes up, it cannot improvise a reply and therefore becomes useless to the customer or client until it is trained to tackle that particular query.
Which Chatbot is better?
From the statements mentioned above, we can clearly see that both types of chatbots have their own sets of merits and demerits, including some that are overlapping and some that solve the issues faced by the other.
So, while it is hard to state which of these chatbots is better as each business have their own sets of requirements and most would prefer using both to access a larger audience, we can come to a consensus that the WhatsApp chatbot is a more useful tool in everyday life of both the business and the consumer.
It has a few things going for it versus the Web chatbot, including but not limited to:
- The consumer doesn’t have to visit any website or download a new application, making it much easier to access due to seamless WhatsApp integration.
- It can be used by all types of businesses as they don’t have to make a chatbot from scratch thanks to the WhatsApp business API.
- The online messaging application has an enormous user base which the businesses can access.
- It can give updates to the consumer on their queries even days after they have left the chat window. The best example of this is updates on delivery time and date.
Whizard WhatsApp API is a Business Service Provider that provides businesses with a fast, customizable and safe method to interact with customers. Our chatbot solutions cater to the diverse needs of clients thereby delivering seamless chatbot integration to revolutionize business-customer interaction.