How to Engage the Foodies and Increase Customer Satisfaction with WhatsApp Business API
The food industry is a hyper-competitive field, which has led to consolidation as companies continue to claw for a bigger slice of the sector. As a mobile/food app marketer, you need to have a user retention strategy in place to get an edge over the competition.
Globally, about 70% of businesses have implemented a mobile marketing strategy to build more customer engagement. Restaurant businesses however have been slow to adopt text-based marketing.
SMS messaging and WhatsApp have been used as the medium to increase customer engagement. WhatsApp, in particular, has been gaining traction as a must-have customer engagement channel because it tackles many of the issues raised by the increased demand for takeout orders, convenience, and in the post COVID era, processes that address customers’ health/safety concerns, all because a takeout order can be managed almost entirely using these digital channels.
Highlighted are six important reasons why WhatsApp Business API can potentially change everything for restaurant and food-tech app owners:
1. Wider reach
WhatsApp boasts of an active audience network of over 2 billion users — every day to chat, and increasingly, to order and pay for items — including food orders — all from within the app. Currently, the private messaging platform already plays a significant role in many consumers’ everyday lives, making it the ideal channel for food chains to leverage.
2. Enable automation
An inexpensive WhatsApp chatbot can be integrated, freeing staff entirely from the ordering process. A chatbot can cover the entire in-app customer journey from presenting menus to taking orders, confirming delivery, taking and verifying payments, and updating the customer via real-time notifications.
3. Improve the notification process
WhatsApp Business can allow food-tech owners to include rich media such as images, maps, display menus, send out receipts/delivery notifications, etc. Also, should a complicated issue arise — for instance, an order is wrong — the customer can instantly reach out via WhatsApp, and connect in real-time to a customer support staff for a swift resolution.
4. Reduce the burden of too many apps
Customers are already burdened downloading too many apps.
There are already many food downloading apps and it can be a struggle for users to keep up with them. Instead, they are looking for apps able to perform multiple services; Just an app that provides a single service, put differently, WhatsApp.
5. Increase security
WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption affords only the customer and the business the ability to view any messages.
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) can be deployed if required to further increase the users’ confidence, also the verification badges displayed reassure the user that they are talking to a legitimate company and not a potential scammer.
Planning this digital path?
WhatsApp offers a more frictionless customer experience. When setting WhatsApp as your new business communication channel, the first important step is to clearly communicate how both existing and potential customers can contact your business when required with a well-organized awareness campaign.
This can be done through digital ads like Facebook ads that click to WhatsApp in ads manager — this simply connects your existing Facebook posts and ads to your WhatsApp channel. Newsletters and newsfeed announcements on other official social media channels are also a great way to start.
How Can Your Restaurant or Food-app Use Termii’s Messaging Platform?
As a proven engagement tool, Termii’s messaging speed, agility, and performance enable a great customer experience that customers use daily. Here’s what integrating Termii’s WhatsApp channels can do for restaurant marketers:
- Deliver core functionality of advanced restaurant smartphone apps plus the ability to chat directly with customer support representatives.
- Easily send transactional and marketing messages to improve customer engagement.
- Deliver real-time updates/notifications on orders and promotions to opted-in users with rich media in the form of images, etc.
- Track user engagement in the form of message views (read receipts), clicks, shares, and location.
- WhatsApp Chatbot directories to accommodate every form of dialogue to help restaurant business owners communicate services like delivery, loyalty management, and customer feedback with a simple tap.
In conclusion, by adopting customer experience technologies like WhatsApp Business — the winning solution to retaining customers by keeping them engaged, the food-tech business sector can begin on its journey to add value and potential for scale.
Source:
Cecilia Abegunde
Storytelling Lead Termii Inc.
