Mukuru is well known as a market-leading international money transfer company. Their focus is on assisting financially underserved migrants in Africa to send money to relatives or friends back home. Mukuru also offers additional financial services to clients who would otherwise be out of reach. The service is affordable for customers and Mukuru offers continuous support at every stage of the money transfer process. Despite their success, their agents were overloaded with queries which led to a decrease in leads as customers had limited access.
Mukuru helps migrant workers in Africa to transfer money internationally at lower costs than traditional banks. To make their serice more accessible Mukuru broke down the process for their customer journey.
Once signed up, users have the option to complete money transfers over their mobile site, app, or using USSD.
The challenge Mukuru faced was that customers required a support channel that was always available and reliable, at any time of day. Without this, Mukuru faced a strain on their formal customer support channels.
How was this problem solved? By implementing a WhatsApp Business API chatbot for quick, real-time service and support.
With services provided to millions of users in over 20 countries in Africa and Asia, as well as the UK and EU, Mukuru chose WhatsApp to be the new channel for customer communication. The choice was obvious, since WhatsApp is one of the most popular communication channels in Africa, and the number one app in the world.
Mukuru created a chatbot over WhatsApp, which helps customers manage their money transfers faster without assistance from a live agent. Menu options over WhatsApp are also available which allows for customer-to-agent chat when necessary. Before sending any notifications over WhatsApp, businesses are required to collect opt-ins from customers. Mukuru did this by:
- Directing customers to Mukuru’s Facebook page, where they can opt-in to WhatsApp
- Having new customers select WhatsApp when choosing their preferences during the sign-up process
- Also exploring the option of letting customers opt-in when they call the customer service center
In order to use WhatsApp with Mukuru, customers start a WhatsApp chat with Mukuru using the same phone number they entered during the sign-up process. Once the chatbot responds, customers receive menu options from which they can choose what they want to do next.
To make this all quick and easy, Mukuru received full support from Infobip (our technology providers) during the onboarding process and during the technical implementation stage. In addition to this, we also helped them to build the chatbot logic and register WhatsApp templates.
WhatsApp proved to be the channel that customers preferred using as they already had access to it.
22% of users moved to WhatsApp after the first week of implementation, optimizing customer support workloads and costs.
Introducing WhatsApp helped provide customers assistance at every step of the customer journey – automating onboarding, account creation, balance checks, and money transfer oversight processes. As a result, 22% of Mukuru’s existing customers opted-in to use WhatsApp instead of USSD.
This resulted in a decrease in call center costs, and an increase in customer support agent efficiency. Now that customers can complete standard transactions and access FAQs using WhatsApp, Mukuru agents have more time to help customers with any in-depth issues they may have.
Using WhatsApp Business resulted in 15% savings in reverse billed USSD costs per month for Mukuru, as well as a 5% reduction in the overall cost of transaction SMS messages.
Mukuru’s WhatsApp chatbot enhanced the customer experience by offering services over a channel that customers prefer to use. Now, Mukuru customers experience more convenience when using WhatsApp to complete transactions in comparison to their previous experience when using Mukuru’s service either over USSD, calling customer service, or making the trip to a Mukuru branch office. Using WhatsApp as a new communication channel also resulted in a 663% increase in customer feedback received from October 2018 to December 2018 via the ˝rate our service˝ feature.
