WhatsApp Support Agents (Idea)
WhatsApp Support Agents. An idea for the #buildinpublic community.
WhatsApp Support Agents - Idea for the #buildinpublic community.
This comes from a real requirement that I once had. There's players out there that claim to do it but I haven't seen anyone who does a "basic" version of this (e.g. There's Zendesk but their pricing gets sizable because of all the other features they have, which are not used.)
Use Case
As a small company, but with more than one customer service agent, there's a need for a solution where multiple customer support agents can respond to customers via a single WhatsApp account. Yes, logging in on different devices is currently possible but there needs to be some level of sophistication, such as assigning tickets to a particular agent, and marking tickets done/resolved or even escalating them to JIRA. This is the basic value that a customer support team needs.
Existing Solutions / Incumbents / Problems with incumbents.
Whilst there are solutions for messaging customers on WhatsApp, they are usually restricted to one agent per WhatsApp number. This is because WhatsApp API does not support group chats (to my existing knowledge).
Zendesk. Too big. Too expensive
Qontak. Cannot reply to WhatsApp messages one the customer responds.
Yellow.ai. Not used this yet. Might be worth looking into.
Sleekflow. Good solution but it still doesn't have the group chat function.
Potential Solution / Technical Wise
Create a very simple web or mobile interface for customer service agents to reply to WhatsApp messages through WhatsApp's API.
To overcome the main problem of the group chat limitation, messages from agents will send to a one to one WhatsApp chat but the difference is that the agents name will be enclosed in square brackets (or similar) to let the customer know which agent is responding.
Future bells & whistles / features.
Further advancements on this idea could be:
1. to allow the company to create AI generated auto-responses from LLMs that can reply to customers on a 24/7 basis. Again, there are solutions for this but they are usually too expensive, or not lightweight enough, and are not coupled with the multiple agent feature.
2. Integration with Jira. For escalating tickets to the development team.
What are your thoughts? Message me on twitter at @growth_hc. It's an idea that's worth a try.