Blog / WhatsApp AI chatbot: WhatsApp AI for your business

WhatsApp AI chatbot: WhatsApp AI for your business

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By Johannes Mansbart

CEO & Co-Founder, chatarmin.com

Last updated at: October 11, 2024

WhatsApp Strategy

☝️ The most important facts in brief

  • Use Cases: WhatsApp AI chatbots enhance sales, support, lead generation, and marketing automation with personalized and efficient interactions.
  • Cost: Costs are mainly for the WhatsApp Business Platform (80%) and the WhatsApp marketing tool (20%); detailed budget estimates available.
  • Setup Duration: Realistic timeline from onboarding to going live with WhatsApp AI chatbot is manageable and progressive.
  • Compliance: Chatarmin’s WhatsApp AI chatbot solution ensures GDPR compliance, protecting customer data.

Good support staff are hard to find and human customer service is virtually impossible to scale. Static chatbots often reach their limits and are often perceived as useless by the end customer. That's why Chatarmin is the first WhatsApp marketing tool in the world to develop a GDPR-compliant WhatsApp AI chatbot.

WhatsApp AI Chatbot: WhatsApp AI for your business

Source: META

Chatarmin customers such as BAUHAUS Austria, METRO and Marc O'Polo agree: WhatsApp is becoming increasingly important as a communication channel. But what do companies in the DACH region actually use WhatsApp Business for?

WhatsApp Sales & Support: Fast and personal touchpoints with your customers along the entire user journey

WhatsApp Marketing:

  • Pull marketing: lead generation, lead enrichment and inbound inquiries via WhatsApp.
  • Push marketing: WhatsApp campaigns and WhatsApp newsletters to activate and re-target your existing customers

Integrations and automations: Workflows via WhatsApp, funnel optimizations, onboarding flows, retargeting automations, system synchronizations

As the usual use cases for a WhatsApp AI chatbot are in Sales & Support, we will focus on this in this blog post:

  • The application areas and use cases of your WhatsApp enterprise AI
  • The costs of your WhatsApp AI chatbot
  • The time it takes to go live with your WhatsApp AI for your company
  • The GDPR compliance of Chatarmin's WhatsApp AI chatbot solution

The goal of this blog post is for you to know about all these points to inform your decision on the relevance of using your own enterprise WhatsApp AI.

WhatsApp AI Chatbot by Chatarmin: AI WhatsApp chatbot for your business

WhatsApp is becoming more popular than email. Source: Google Trends, 04.2024

WhatsApp AI chatbot: areas of application and use cases

Chatarmin customers such as "fatbikes" or "bedrop" handle up to 99% of their customer support requests via WhatsApp. One of the following support solutions is usually used:

  • Static chatbot (opening hours, stock levels, delivery times, active ingredients of products...)
  • (Hyper-)personalized chatbot (shipping information, delivery time, ideal next product in case of personal order history, compilation of the perfect shopping cart for a friend, etc. etc.)
  • Human agent, optional after a lead enablement flow

AI WhatsApp chatbots are more efficient than static flow automations

WhatsApp lead generation & WhatsApp lead enrichment of an insurance company, source: Chatarmin

These solutions scale well even without the use of AI, but sooner or later they will reach their limits. Static chatbots

  • do not formulate individual statements
  • "do not think for themselves"
  • do not learn

This makes the setup and maintenance of these systems time-consuming, and in the latter case with humans as customer advisors, also cost-intensive and kappa-intensive.

WhatsApp AI chatbot with ticket creation in Gorgias "end of flow".

"End-of-flow" Gorgias-ticket-creation due to limitations of static WhatsApp chatbots, source: Chatarmin

It is therefore advisable to deal with a WhatsApp AI chatbot, especially if:

  • there is a high level of requests
  • an above-average number of "easy-to-answer questions" are asked
  • the WhatsApp AI chatbot is granted access to user data, enabling scalable, individually personalizable AI support via WhatsApp

In this video you can see the WhatsApp AI chatbot in action:

Loom Video Thumbnail

Source: Chatarmin Youtube

Chatarmin works together with the following tech infrastructures for the practical implementation of these WhatsApp AI chatbot projects:

  • Chatbase
  • Ultimate.ai
  • its own LLM ("Language learning model") based on the technology of OpenAI

In particular, the launch of the world's first ChatGPT-WhatsApp integration has caused a stir. Alternative application possibilities would be quizzes, lead enrichment flows or knowledge databases. We are talking here about service and gamification projects, or digital initiatives such as knowledge databases, tour guides, etc. Think "ChatGPT via WhatsApp".

WhatsApp AI chatbot costs: This is how much your WhatsApp AI costs

The costs for GDPR-compliant WhatsApp are divided into

  • Costs for using the Whatsapp Business Platform (80%)
  • Costs for using the WhatsApp marketing tool (20%)

The WhatsApp business costs are described in detail here and are billed by META (formerly Facebook) as follows:

  • 1,000 free conversations per month
  • a conversation is a 24-hour time window from the start of the chat
  • the costs vary depending on the customer's country code
  • the costs vary depending on the "type of conversation" (utility, service, marketing, authentication)

Typically, 60-90% of your WhatsApp budget will be used to pay the conversational costs of the WhatsApp Business Platform. Only 10-40% of your total WhatsApp AI budget for your business goes to software vendors or business service providers like Chatarmin.

You can request your personal budgeting for your WhatsApp AI chatbot here:

Calculate your WhatsApp business case with Chatarmin WhatsApp Marketing Tool.

Request the cost calculation of your WhatsApp AI chatbot here!

Calculation examples: Realistic cost estimate of a WhatsApp AI for your company

Calculation example 1: 10,000 bot requests/month, with standard WhatsApp Business Platform costs and Chatarmin "Smarter" package, Austrian WhatsApp cost catalog

ItemType of expenseFormulaTotal in €
WhatsAppConversation costs€0.0329/K€296.10
Variable Chatarmin costs€20.00/1,000 optins/monthMonthly€200.00
Fixed Chatarmin costsChatarmin fixed costsSmarter plan€199.00
Total costsTotal monthly costs(WA costs) + (Chatarmin costs)€695.10

For 10,000 support requests per month, you would most likely need 1-3 support employees.

Your cost savings amount to several thousand euros, with a scalable and more efficient operational structure.

Example calculation 2: 100,000 bot requests/month, with standard WhatsApp Business Platform costs and Chatarmin "Smarter" package

ItemType of expenditureFormula€ sum
WhatsAppConversation costs€0.0329/K€3,257.10
Variable Chatarmin costs€20.00/1,000 contacts/monthMonthly€200.00
Fixed Chatarmin costsChatarmin fixed costsSmarter plan€199.00
Total costsMonthly(WA costs) + (Chatarmin costs)€5,456.10

For 100,000 monthly support requests, you would probably need 3-8 employees. These will cost you many times more than the Chatarmin WhatsApp AI chatbot solution.

We hope that you can now calculate your WhatsApp AI chatbot budget using our sheet or the tables above.

Feel free to contact us if you would like us to calculate your case together:

Johannes Mansbart

Johannes Mansbart

CEO & Co-Founder

WhatsApp AI chatbot: How long until WhatsApp AI for your company

The following roadmap is realistic for your company from chatbot offer acceptance to the "go-live" of WhatsApp AI:

30-minute tech onboarding with Chatarmin co-founder Armin Daryabegi

  • Registration of the WABA in your META Business Suite
  • Verification of the phone number on which the WABA is based
  • Creation of a Chatarmin account
  • Synchronization of the Chatarmin account with the WABA
  • Credit card payment of WhatsApp and Chatarmin costs

30-minute product onboarding with the Chatarmin team

  • Creation of first flows
  • Sending of first test campaigns
  • Training of your own language learning model

After that, you are de facto ready to get started with your WhatsApp AI chatbot. It is important to know that the WhatsApp AI for your company will continue to learn and improve over time. We therefore recommend a quick launch and gradual iteration with horizontal and vertical scaling of the project.

BONUS: GDPR compliance of your WhatsApp AI chatbot

It is important for companies to use the WhatsApp Business Platform. This is the only way to ensure you are GDPR compliant to protect your customers' personal data.

Whether you use the WhatsApp Business app or the WhatsApp Business Platform (API), appropriate end-customer consent should be obtained, data should be handled responsibly and easy opt-out options should be offered.

Discussing if the WhatsApp Business API is GDPR-compliant or not

Here you can find our blog post on GDPR compliance of the WhatsApp Business Platform as well as our statement on Chatarmin's GDPR compliance.

Please note that this article provides insights into GDPR compliance on WhatsApp, but does not constitute legal advice. For full information on legal obligations under the GDPR, we recommend consulting the official GDPR website of the European Commission.

Book your personal consultation on your WhatsApp AI chatbot here:

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