Collecting customer reviews through WhatsApp
Review collection via WhatsApp:
In online business, where your client is an end user, it becomes imperative to always keep on using the best ways of communication. At Goibibo, we always strive to adopt latest technologies for helping our users. Nowadays any user in India with an online presence is aware of WhatsApp and knows how to use it. And hence, what better way to communicate with them for hotel review collection than via WhatsApp.
WhatsApp as conversational review collection interface:
If you want to communicate with customers then you have to use a medium which ensures that you will reach out to them easily, and conversational flow of WhatsApp allows this to be done in an intuitive manner.
Indian travelers are highly familiar with the conversational flow of WhatsApp and that makes it a perfect tool to use it as one of the channels in review collection process.
How it works:
Steps:
- A scheduled task is triggered everyday to send WhatsApp messages to users who have booked hotels via Goibibo and have checked out 2 days prior. Snapshot of a sample rating solicitation message via WhatsApp -
2. If user enters anything in the chat window, it comes to our NLP engine which then processes the user input.
If NLP engine is able to capture a valid rating from user input then it sends it to UGC(User Generated Content) system. This rating is then stored in UGC system and next message is triggered to user for collection of review (with or without images) about his/her stay experience. All this while system maintains the state of user that he/she has already provided rating. Snapshot of a sample review solicitation message via WhatsApp -
If on the other hand, a valid rating is not captured by NLP engine then we trigger message to provide correct rating again. Snapshot of a sample message via WhatsApp -
3. Whenever user is done with feedback as explained in message then we send thank you message to him/her. Snapshot of a sample message via WhatsApp -
Impact:
Response to this feature from Goibibo community has been phenomenal. There is a 15 % uptick in review conversion percentage. Text and Image content is also superb.
Future Enhancements:
One of the major Complexity of this flow is, it is not a one way conversation. And input from user depends on previous message which was sent to user. And next message which needs to be sent to user depends on user input.
So we are working on to create a funnel where we can track the entire conversation with particular user. This will help us to make this flow better by analyzing the time difference between two continuos messages and input provided by user.
