The simplicity of WhatsApp shouldn’t fool you into thinking its use is limited to mere casual chatter. WhatsApp can be a powerful and highly cost-effective business tool to those who know how to properly employ its features for business. The Nation online shares five lucrative ways to use WhatsApp for business.
- For customer engagement and support
WhatsApp is a great tool for delivering customer service and a great platform for customer engagement and support. WhatsApp’s SMS features and its ability to send images, video clips, documents, media and audio files make it a great tool for customer engagement and support; it can be used to engage customers and help increase sales as well as garner a good reputation for your business. WhatsApp is also a great follow up tool for converting business leads into repeat orders, and is a platform for you to also share regular updates about your business at little or no cost rather than through email or SMS. It’s also an effective, convenient and cost-effective way for customers to reach out to you when they have complaints or feedback on your products or services, rather than customers wasting time and spending hundreds of Naira on-hold, waiting for their calls to be picked on a customer care line.
- For market survey
WhatsApp is a great interactive tool for getting real-time suggestions and feedback from your customers about your products and services, through brief and concise questions relating to the areas of your business or service you need information on.
- For promotions or advertising
In addition to helping with customer engagement and support, WhatsApp offers a good platform for promoting your products, discount or sales offers. If you don’t want to broadcast messages, you can use your display picture, status updates and even profile updates to promote or advertise your products or services. If you want to be creative and put in some extra effort, you can send out e-brochures with images of a product, video clips containing directions on the use of a product, or video clips on discount or sales offerings on your products or services to targeted people or groups on WhatsApp. You can also solicit responses to your videos or e-brochures at the same time.
- For business services and transactions
As a business owner, you can encourage your customer to make orders for your products or services on WhatsApp, and you can even hold E-Classes or Tutorials on WhatsApp. In cases where your students might find it hard to get together at a central venue, WhatsApp can easily be the venue for your tutorial classes, and WhatsApp media, documents and audio file sharing feature makes it very interactive for an online tutorial platform. Your students can easily make the payments to be included in the class before-hand, and once the payment is confirmed, you add the students to the closed WhatsApp group for your tutorial class. Even concierge services can be run through WhatsApp, as well as other similar business services.
- For internal team communication
A great thing about WhatsApp is that practically everyone uses it and it really doesn’t require any training to use. In addition, you don’t need to explicitly ask your employees or team members to check the app because chances are they’re already hooked to it, this makes WhatsApp a great tool for internal team communication. You can form WhatsApp group for different teams in your business, for example you can form a WhatsApp group for the Business Strategy team, another for the Sales and Development team etc. Your team can share ideas, instant messages, images, audio files, video clips and other media among themselves in a quick and fun way. You also don’t need to be too afraid of the information shared on the these groups getting out because WhatsApp messages are protected with an end-to-end encryption that not only makes it one of the safest messaging apps in existence, but also adequately protects your data from leaks.
Culled from The Nation
