EXPERT INSIGHTS

Feb-27-2020

Event registration via WhatsApp

Khoros Staff

Editor's note: This blog post was originally written on the Flow.ai website. Flow.ai was acquired by Khoros in 2021 to advance Khoros' conversational AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities and data science expertise. This blog post has been adapted to be on the Khoros blog.


On March 17 2020, together with Building Blocks and Teleperformance, we organized an exclusive Conversational Commerce event called Behind the Screens. Under the motto “practice what you preach” we decided to let participants sign up via a WhatsApp chatbot!

Why register participants via WhatsApp?

The Conversational Commerce event is organized in the Netherlands and WhatsApp is by far the most widely used messaging app in that country. With WhatsApp, participants can register in an innovative and accessible way.

In addition to the innovation and accessibility, it is also easy to set up a WhatsApp registration chatbot using Flow.ai and participants can be reached directly and personally at a later time.

Since this was the first time that we started using WhatsApp in this way, we were not sure what to expect. Are people going to sign up via WhatsApp? And what other questions will be asked?

In this article, we will explain how we put together this event registration via WhatsApp. You can also download our event chatbot as a template so that you can use it yourself.

Combination of on- and offline

To invite the invitees personally, we had a beautiful physical invitation sent, including 3 tickets with QR code.

By scanning the QR code of a ticket, the registration flow starts via WhatsApp. After completing the registration confirmation, it was possible to send a message to participants at a later time and the registrations were automatically added in a Google Spreadsheet.

In addition to the general registration flow, we anticipated a number of questions:

  • What is on the program?
  • Share address and route information
  • Cancellations and handoff for other questions

Design, conversion and follow-up

The event chatbot consists of 3 groups with flows. The first group is to register participants. It asks for information such as the name, email and company name. The second group of flows is filled with frequently asked questions about the event and the third group catches unknown questions and forwards them to someone from the organization.

...All completed registrations will appear in the spreadsheet. This way we can always reach participants and ensure that badges are ready at the entrance...

Signing up via WhatsApp is new, which is why it is also difficult to estimate the conversion. However, we can measure the conversion by using tags. Tags provide insight into the number of people who have started interacting with the chatbot and how many people have subsequently logged in or out.

To increase the conversion, we have integrated timers and a dropout in the chatbot. Are there people who started the registration but did not complete it? Then the timers ensure that this person receives a message after 3 hours asking whether he or she wants to continue the registration. Are there any questions unknown to the chatbot? No problem, we do a handoff to someone from the organization who can answer incoming questions via chat. The bot is of course integrated with WhatsApp for Business and to capture participants, we used Zapier and a Google Spreadsheet.

All completed registrations will appear in the spreadsheet with the company’s name, the user’s name, email and phone number. This way we can always reach participants and we can ensure that badges are ready at the entrance.

Results

The entire registration flow via WhatsApp was an experiment with a fantastic result. Did everything go well?

For the vast majority of registrations, yes. Because it was so very new, we had to refine the registration flow a number of times and we saw that the bot occasionally asked a little too often to complete the registration. Fortunately, this was very easy and direct to arrange via Flow.ai.

The results are very positive! If we measure the conversion by dividing the number of registrations by the number of people who started the chat with the bot, we arrive at a conversion of 57%. A great result and we can say that the registration process via a WhatsApp chatbot works great.

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