Pre and Post COVID Buying Behaviour
How brands can sell millions of dollars worth of goods over WhatsApp?
Getting Close to Customers is Getting Hard
For a lot of amazing brands, brand building via offline channels doesn’t work anymore. It’s too hard to get the customer to show up.
For instance, while I went with my mother and bought her a saree from a Kalamandir store pre-COVID — I am unlikely to do so now. Kalamandir will have to figure out a way to reach my mother, online.
Online is Not Enough
In the last decade, we’ve seen a migration of India’s businesses move from brick and mortar to selling online. This adoption began with adding a website and then an app; using both as an order booking channel i.e. to get orders. Though the community and trust are still built completely offline or in-store.
For instance, Namdhaari, a chain of departmental stores run by Future Group has an app — without even a Talk to Support option!
Another Day, Another App
Even in the app-universe, as we spend more and more time online, we suspect that app fatigue will kick in. Consumers are already reluctant to download the nth app for one specific thing. When was the last time you installed a new app by seeing an ad on a TV or any OOH Advertising?
Mere Internet presence with web and an app was okay because it was an added revenue source. Not the biggest order funnel. We see this changing already. We expect this change to be permanent.
Earlier, the customer came to the brands — now, the best brands will go to the customer.
Enter Conversational Commerce aka WhatsApp
As a consumer business, if you were planning for a post-COVID world, you’d build for an Internet first world. Now, that isn’t enough.
In the pre-COVID world, some apps did some personalisation. For instance, remembering restaurants you ordered from recently.
This now evolves into a new form personalised selling, as more and more of us spend more time indoors — esp. on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is not SMS-replacement. Using it for only marketing would be a criminal waste of the customer’s time. WhatsApp is an omnichannel; sales, support, marketing. It’s the best way to go to where a customer already is.
This idea of selling by talking to your customer directly is Conversational Commerce.
There are entire businesses built around this insight. For e.g. Meesho which helps small resellers sell to their customers via WhatsApp. So much so that the name of the company is synonymous with WhatsApp.
They’re our favourite example of using WhatsApp to perfection. It’s quite obvious that they encourage their re-sellers to make the most of this “channel” as well. Check their Reseller Learning Resource. It has an entire section on WhatsApp — to help their resellers off to a good start.
Meesho encourages every reseller to book orders via the Meesho app. This makes for a somewhat clunky experience. This is App sales, not WhatsApp sales. As a business, you can always send an app or web link, how many do you think will convert from there?
Not as many as we’d like.
This implies that the direct action required by businesses will be the following:
- Directly: Sell and communicate directly with customers
- Touch Lives: Emotional connection with customers during and after-sales
- Connect: Personalise customer experience on channels they flock to
There’s a better alternative: Direct To Consumer — sell from within WhatsApp!
Talking to consumers on WhatsApp is a personal touchpoint. Consumers will expect a human connection: advice, small talk, and support — not only sales.
There are many advantages to this approach. We cherry-pick some use cases for brands looking to adopt WhatsApp. We select these from our observations and lessons learnt from the ecosystem. We cover examples across Direct To Consumer, FinTech, and Real Estate. We pick examples from India and Middle East markets both. You should check out this write up by one of my friend Misbah around how they have used WhatsApp to scale their community-led commerce platform to million users.
How e-commerce brands are using WhatsApp to sell $3M worth of goods during COVID-19
1. Level Up Sales: Optimise Product Listing and Service
WhatsApp Sales is digital-first, with no data entry or error steps. This makes it a perfect tool for sales experimentation and optimization.
As a business, you can integrate this with your sales data to optimize the offering in a variety of ways. Some of those are: By region, by gender, age, time of day, and several similar other parameters.
This can lead to not only higher volume in sales, but also higher margins. You are in control of what and how they optimize their offerings.
2. Reduce Support Load
The simplest, most effective use case: Keep the customer proactively informed (with their permission of course). Prompt but careful updates on WhatsApp reduce the need for customers to reach out to you.
3. Deepen Brand Loyalty
Post-sales experience in Indian brands has always been expensive.
This is because we’d need a physical presence and the customer would be required to visit the store. With WhatsApp, brands can check-in with them a few days or weeks after their buy. This personal relationship makes them more likely to buy from the brand in the future.
4. Accelerate New Product Launch
Launching a new business line, product or service is tedious and fraught with risk. The biggest risk is whether customers are interested in your new offering at the price point that works for you.
In the SMS world, you might have done this by asking customers to reply over SMS. With WhatsApp, this is as simple as “Do you want to pre-pay Rs. X for our new product Y?” and let them pay you in advance. This not only reduces risk but also helps you launch your product much better.
5. Virality & Exclusivity
The one thing OnePlus phones did really well? Creating a brand around exclusivity. Everyone had to ask for invites and that meant the product went viral. Such campaigns can now reach your entire loyal customer base.
WhatsApp makes it possible for you to set up Pop Up stores or launch “Limited Edition” variants of your goods with minimal effort. This enables frictionless sharing to bring word-of-mouth publicity/virality to your product. This reduces your customer acquisition costs.
6. Faster Iterations
The WhatsApp integrations with established players such as Verloop have the option to collect feedback from within WhatsApp. This enables you to iterate quickly on what is working and what is not. You can even integrate this with your store or call centre if you have one.
7. No More Queuing
Store queues that move to digital will win and survive. Large malls, stores that rely on large footfalls will suffer even post-COVID because of capacity restrictions. Customers will also prefer a store with digital queues for a dinner out. Or buying their favourite bubble tea.
8. Contactless Pickups
The other way to reduce queuing is, order on WhatsApp -> pay online -> just walk to the store to collect.
Stores reduce queuing and operational cost, customers reduce exposure and save time.
Why depend on Amazon or Flipkart to do contactless sales when you already know how to run your store?
9. 10x Efficient Inventory Management
Inventory Management has been hard because of the logistics and middlemen involved. Integrating your Order Management Systems with WhatsApp can give immediate visibility of your stock per SKU to your customer.
Taking WhatsApp Live: What to watch out for?
Adoption
Use Short URLs (like bit.ly) or QR Codes for Offline Advertising.
Sharing the phone number also works great for personal contacts. For digital advertising, shortened URLs work better as they open directly in WhatsApp when clicked.
Process Changes
Minimal SKU Count
Selecting and navigating through many SKUs is hard over WhatsApp. That is why we recommend keeping the choices to a small number.
This interface rewards focus, not diversification: The success of your business is dependent on the few SKUs it has.
Ethos follows that those selling luxury goods or niché services are at an advantage.
Digital Genius
Once customers have shopped with you over WhatsApp — they will use it also for support. This is unavoidable. This will happen.
Be prepared to build a team of Virtual front-liners.
These Geniuses will be trained and incentivised for being human. Optimising for buyer experience will be more important than cost-saving. Hence, we will be measuring support teams more on satisfaction scores, and not on ticket closure rates. Doing the opposite will lead to a poor experience for customers — hurting your long term revenue.
As buyers, we want the salesperson to understand our shopping indecision. And not just the quickest solution to our shopping questions.
At Verloop, we’re building a Hybrid AI solution — which is built to augment and assist humans, not replace them. We help you re-train their internal teams as well.
Is it imperfect? Yes.
And we love it
First Mover Advantage
The first few brands in each category to adopt WhatsApp will become sticky. The customer will have to incur a switching cost in terms of time and effort to set up with someone else. As more brands inevitably adopt WhatsApp, some might offer a poor experience.
What’s Next?
WhatsApp Catalog
From the Official WhatsApp blog:
Previously businesses had to send product photos one at a time and repeatedly provide information — now customers can see their full catalog right within WhatsApp.
This feature is being rolled out to WhatsApp businesses gradually across multiple countries including the US, UK and India. Once, this is rolled out — brands can use chat to talk to the customer, and not limit it to educating them about their offerings.
Payments
WhatsApp Pay is being rolled out in India. This allows businesses to accept payments via UPI directly from a customer. No intermediaries.
Until this is rolled out to a wider population, we recommend that you launch without waiting for it.
Launching early is important because that allows the business to build that very necessary trust with their customer over WhatsApp.
Unlocking Possibilities — Part 2 Coming Soon
There is a wide variety of customer interactions which were not profitable for offline brands, but with WhatsApp could be. From simple things such as referral discounts to loyalty programs to offering exclusivity: pop-up stores, limited items — we cover these and more in our Part 2.
Sign up here for Part 2:
WhatsApp: Join the group: https://bit.ly/WhatsAppEcommVerloop2020
If you are an entrepreneur building e-com/retail brand and you feel like having a conversation about using WhatsApp for pre/post-sales experience, feel free to ping me at gaurav@verloop.io. I am happy to share some of my learnings, what works and what doesn’t.
