How to Keep Passengers Informed Using WhatsApp Business
We are at a uniquely challenging point in time. Almost overnight, the way we live our lives has changed and made us rethink our day-to-day in both a personal and business sense.
Life, together with our obligations, goes on – and for many, this means travel has not stopped being a part of the daily routine. It’s just become more challenging than ever before.
Timetable changes and cancellations have gone from being occasional nuisances to the norm – and more than ever, travelers will need to be informed. And travelers will need to be informed by asking for information or proactively receiving it.
Plenty of travelers are stuck in foreign countries as a result, and contact centers are overwhelmed by customer enquiries and complaints.
Companies need to rise to the challenge of providing their customers with service information ranging from updates and alerts to refunds. This will help them maintain consumer trust and keep satisfaction high in these challenging times.
Here’s how travel companies can use WhatsApp Business API to send critical alerts and notifications to keep customers calm and safe.
Using WhatsApp to deliver important notifications
During this time of disrupted travel and social distancing, the responsible thing to do is proactively send critical travel information to customers. As passengers hurry back home, customer support teams are overloaded with incoming queries. You can control the amount of calls coming into your contact center by reaching out to customers over the world’s most popular chat app – WhatsApp.
Using WhatsApp Business API allows you to send critical travel updates and notifications during the booking and check-in processes, as well as keep your customers updated all throughout their journey home.
Simple text messages do a lot to keep customers informed – but sometimes they will need more detailed information.
Provide even more information with media message templates
Media message templates allow for the media-rich type of proactive notification that travelers will appreciate, since it communicates just about everything they need to know when they’re on-the-go.
In addition to providing detailed travel information, media message templates can provide customers with general service messages and alerts. These can include:
- e-receipts
- Health and safety guideline updates
- Booking and re-booking confirmations
- Refund confirmations
- Travel contracts and return policies
- Return vouchers
In case passengers require even more information, WhatsApp media message templates can include contact details for customer support – which you can provide via live agents or chatbots.
Use chatbots to provide 24/7 instant, self-service support
When passengers need more detailed service information, a chatbot is a fast and simple way of keeping customers informed 24/7 and on-the-go.
Chatbots act as a self-service for customers to instantly find out more about the latest timetables, return info, ticket changes, lost luggage, and other less complex customer service enquiries.
You can promote your chatbot on your website or promote it on your social media channels by using Click to WhatsApp. This feature helps raise awareness about your chatbot using your existing social media ads – and gives customers the opportunity to start a conversation with your bot, instantly.
Chatbots help travel companies in two main ways:
- Providing instant self-service customer support to travelers by handling critical service announcements, FAQ’s or simple requests 24/7
- Reduces the workload on customer support agents, freeing them to assist with the type of support enquiries that require the detailed assistance only a human agent can provide
Both ways work towards a primary goal, which is to provide critical travel updates and information 24/7 to travelers on-the-go.
Using WhatsApp through an omnichannel cloud contact center solution enables your agents to handle more than one query at a time on a single interface. It also provides them with full conversation history, customer ticket purchase history, and customer demographics so all and any agents are equipped with the right information to resolve queries fast and accurately.
Keep passengers informed when unexpected situations arise
Now more than ever is the time for reliably notifying your users of all critical service alerts – and WhatsApp Business API from a proven service partner can help you achieve this goal. We’ve helped travel companies use WhatsApp Business API to improve the customer experience before, and can help you achieve the same at this uniquely challenging time.
Talk to our experts about how you can use WhatsApp Business API to deliver instant critical notifications to your customers.
