Unlocking the potential of WhatsApp Flows: Design, Build and Manage customized user journeys within the app

In today’s digital landscape, WhatsApp has positioned itself as a prominent avenue for the businesses to do promotional activities, trade transactions, and customer assistance. Globally, WhatsApp has a user base of over 2 Billion monthly active users (MAU), with India being the largest market with 663 million monthly active users1. This outreach demonstrates the massive potential for the businesses to scale on WhatsApp. However, engaging customers to explore your business using WhatsApp needs simplicity of use and a quick turnaround time to reduce customer drop-outs. 

Here comes WhatsApp Flows! Flows is a form based user experience (UX) which provides a simple and frictionless way for brands to design customizable user journeys in WhatsApp.  It enables the creation of essential customer experiences, encompassing functionalities such as account creation, login, appointment scheduling, store location services, and address management, among others.

What is WhatsApp Flows?

Let’s understand WhatsApp Flows with an example. Say a customer gets a WhatsApp message from their favorite restaurant offering a 20% discount on pre-booking the table. There is a ‘Book now’ option in the message which is supposed to take the user to the restaurant’s webpage to do the booking. Here’s what could happen:

As the user is being taken to a different application which doesn’t open for some reason, the user experience is ruined and they may drop-out. This leads to a lost business opportunity for the brand. This is not what you want for your brand and not the user experience you would want your customers to undergo, right?

Now consider the customer journey below using WhatsApp Flows, which provides an in-app customer experience to capture all the booking information from the customer in a single step!

That’s the power of WhatsApp Flows! Flows provide an in-app form for businesses to construct structured interactions with the customers. These structured interactions allow customers to complete things faster within WhatsApp. These interactions could be tailored for diverse use cases like lead generation, appointment booking, login,  account management, surveys & feedback etc.

Let’s look at how WhatsApp Flows helps you with some of the use cases:

• Lead Generation: The Lead Generation Form Flow can be used to collect information gathered from potential customers about a business offering. For example, a fitness center that is looking for customers to experience a new season of exercise classes can generate leads by creating a Flow that asks customers their name and contact information.
• Customer Feedback & Surveys: Customer feedback Form Flow can be used to collect feedback regarding the purchase or delivery experience for your product or service. Brands could ask the customers to rate their product or service and collect improvement suggestions to enhance their support experience.
• Appointment Booking: For service-oriented businesses, appointment management is a crucial task. WhatsApp Flows simplifies this by enabling customers to book appointments by capturing all the required details in a single form, thus reducing drop-outs.
• Login & Account Management: The Login & Account Management Form Flow can be used to allow users to sign-up, sign-in, reset their passwords etc. For example, brands can send marketing messages to their leads, along with a sign-up link, which will open an in-app Flow for those leads to sign-up without leaving WhatsApp.

Benefits for Businesses 

→ Faster task completion reducing customer drop-outs: WhatsApp Flows fast-tracks the customer journey by removing back and forth exchange of messages, effectively reducing customer drop-outs.

→ Better customer engagement leading to higher sales: By providing bespoke simple in-app experiences to the customers, WhatsApp Flows allows customers to complete their journeys within WhatsApp. Therefore, leading to higher conversions for the brands. 

→ Ideal for diverse use cases: Tailor built for form-based conversations, WhatsApp Flows excels in various scenarios including lead generation, appointment bookings, registrations, sign-ups, and customer support. Its versatility makes it a valuable tool for businesses in engaging customers.

With WhatsApp Flows, brands will be able to accomplish more by providing in-app experiences to their customers to solve the majority of their use cases. By integrating various aspects of customer conversation and management into a single, user-friendly platform, Flows offers businesses a unique opportunity to improve their operations and customer relations. It helps customers complete tasks with businesses in WhatsApp fast and simple, without the need to download extra apps.

As more businesses adopt WhatsApp Flows, we can expect to see a paradigm shift in how customer conversations are managed, leading to more efficient, engaging, and customer-centric business practices.

Get started with WhatsApp Flows

Maximize your customer engagement with WhatsApp Flows through Exotel’s expertise.

With over two decades of industry-best practices in managing customer conversations across channels, contact centers, and AI bots, Exotel offers tailored Flows solutions for diverse use cases and industry needs.

Integrating WhatsApp Flows via Exotel grants a unique advantage. Begin user journeys on WhatsApp and smoothly transition to live chat or support center calls for immediate live agent assistance, ensuring frictionless customer experiences.

Contact us today to get started with your WhatsApp Flows journey!