How is WhatsApp used for business? Results of first study in the Netherlands

[jrineakter]

A number of companies actively started working with WhatsApp in 2015. Incidentally, there are also many who are still cautious and are exploring the pros and cons. That is why I got the idea to conduct a broad survey among early adopters. In this article I discuss the results of this first large Dutch survey among the first users of WhatsApp business in the Netherlands.


The subject has interested me for quite some time. In April 2015 I published a book entitled 'WhatsApp for Business'. I have also been actively writing about it for quite some time here on Frankwatching.

Research
For this research I created a questionnaire in January 2016. Potential interested parties were approached via various channels. For example, almost all software companies that offer a dashboard software tool for webcare via WhatsApp cooperated by distributing my questionnaire among their customers (for which thanks again). I also received good responses via my newsletter and social media channels.

Ultimately, 77 companies were bahamas telegram number list willing to cooperate. It is difficult to determine how this number relates to the total business users of WhatsApp in the Netherlands. There are simply no figures for this.

Companies
The first question was about the number of people working in the organization. If we analyze the data, a clear division can be seen: 54.6 percent of the participants are active in a company with fewer than 100 people. The top 26 percent of the participants come from a company with more than 2000 people.

This is easy to explain. Smaller organisations can respond more quickly to new developments and simply do it. They start with a smartphone or WhatsApp for the web. And very large organisations feel more of the need from their customers to join in with these kinds of developments. As a large Dutch bank, for example, you can no longer lag behind in 2016 when it comes to WhatsApp webcare. The group in between is on the one hand not flexible enough, but on the other hand feels less pressure from the environment.

In the sectors where WhatsApp is actively used (according to this study), there are mainly companies that work in information technology (26 percent) or in media, journalism and publishing (18.2 percent). There are also participants from healthcare and consumer goods (both 7.8 percent). The rest of the results were too fragmented to mention here.

WhatsApp Webcare
WhatsApp can be used in various ways: for webcare, for a mailing list where many recipients see a message at the same time, for groups and for individual campaigns. As many as 87 percent of participants use WhatsApp for online digital customer service, while only 14.3 percent use the mailing list function. WhatsApp therefore appears to be primarily a means for mobile customer service for the time being. What will this be like in a year, when companies start to explore the creative possibilities more?

Screenshot 2016-02-14 20.57.17

WhatsApp Business Review
What is the average score for a company's business use of WhatsApp? There were some outliers to the downside, but on average the scores were quite high. The final average score was 7.6. That's a bit lower than expected, but I suspect the outliers at the bottom had an influence on this. I have observed a few times that the score was lower for companies that use the mailing list function. However, the volume is too low to draw any conclusions.

Screenshot 2016-02-14 20.56.21

The participants were also asked which software system they use for the deployment of WhatsApp. This resulted in some stressed phone calls from software suppliers to my address. Apart from that, I have decided not to publish the results, because in my opinion they are distorted. Some companies have made a significant effort to distribute the questionnaire among their users. This makes it difficult to give an objective picture of the landscape of software systems.

An honorable mention, however, goes to OBI4wan, for the effort they made to distribute the questionnaire to their participants. Another footnote: many SMEs simply use the official WhatsApp web application.

Individual WhatsApp messages
One of the most difficult questions in the questionnaire to interpret was the average number of individual WhatsApp messages a company receives per month. There were high outliers, such as 23,000 and 15,000, but many only answered with a few dozen and sometimes hundreds of messages. For the statistics, it can be reported that the average number of individual WhatsApp messages per month is 592, but as mentioned, this answer is a bit of a balancing act.

Customer satisfaction
The measured customer satisfaction score among the participants of this questionnaire was much more unambiguous. The final score from the customer satisfaction survey (when measured) is an 8.2. That is neat. The answers given do show that only a third of the organizations measure this figure.

Average waiting time
As for the average waiting time, we see a similar split as the question about 'the number of individual WhatsApp messages a company receives per month'. Here, there are outliers at the bottom: mostly large organizations that have integrated WhatsApp into their entire social media workflow. Here, there are often response times of 3 or 5 minutes. However, the most common answer was 60 minutes. A response time of one hour is apparently the standard. For the statistics: the average of all 77 participants came to 29 minutes.

One participant added an important footnote: “First impressions are very important, so respond quickly. After that, it seems to become less important: people sometimes only read their messages in the evening: that fits with the asynchronous nature of WhatsApp.”

When asked about other social media channels for webcare, Twitter and Facebook are leading, respectively 81 percent and 72 percent. Of the participants, 34 percent look at LinkedIn and 23 percent at Instagram when it comes to messages or questions from customers.