How to Train Your WhatsApp Business Chatbot for Better Customer Interactions

Updated on January 22, 2025

WhatsApp Business API from Meta lets businesses talk directly with their customers through one of the most popular social messaging apps. With over 2 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp is a great channel to connect with your customers. 

However, providing individual support through the platform can be challenging, given its broad user base. To face this challenge head-on, businesses use AI-enabled WhatsApp business chatbots that can automate most repetitive messages and ensure that customer support representatives are free to attend to the most complex and vital issues. 

In this article, we’ll provide 6 tips on how to train these WhatsApp business chatbots to improve customer conversations. We will cover:

1. Designing Clear Conversation Flows
2. Leveraging Customer Interaction Data
3. Using Advanced Personalization
4. Training on Brand Voice and Tone
5. Enabling Chatbot-Human Handoff
6. Implementing Feedback Loops

1. Designing Clear Conversation Flows

Conversation design is at the core of how chatbots are made interactive. We cover the details of how you can leverage conversation design to build better chatbots in our blog, but to summarize, you need to:

• Orient Your Users – Provide proper cues to help your customers understand the conversation better. This should include appropriate welcome messages, a direct link to the main menu, and hints on how the customer can continue the conversation. 
• Facilitate Mutual Understanding – Use plain language and provide better context to the customers. While training the chatbot, use as many variations of a question as possible and avoid disambiguation. This will help your chatbot answer as many questions as possible. 
• Good Manners – To foster more human-like conversation, include cues for small talk and empathy. This can consist of small questions about the weather or the environment and small linguistic cues that help the chatbot seem more empathetic. 
• Short Interactions – Keep every trained interaction in the chatbot as comprehensive and concise as possible. This will help your customers get to value quicker. 

Good conversation design flows can help you create a better chatbot capable of more human-like conversations. You can use a flow designer like Kompose or a code-based environment like Dialogflow to do conversation design. 

2. Leveraging Customer Interaction Data

It’s impossible to implement proper conversational design without using customer interaction data. You need to monitor the WhatsApp business channels to get data on customer conversations on the platform. The data you need to collect and analyze will include:

• Chat Transcripts – This is your core interaction data, and you can use this to find patterns of the most asked questions, and the most common troubleshooting areas.
• Customer Sentiment – Once you’ve launched the bot, keep monitoring the sentiments of the customers who interact with your bot. This will help you craft better responses over time. 
• User Preferences – Your interaction data will have critical points around the solutions that people like the most; this will help you create conversation flows and add more value to the customer.
• Customer Insights – This comes from detailed 1:1 conversations with customers and their remarks on your online interactions. Use these insights to further iterate on your chatbot and create better interactions. 

These data points will provide the insights you need to train your chatbot for further use. They will form the core of how you train and design the flows in your chatbot interface. 

3. Using Advanced Personalization

Personalization has been the buzzword in customer support and lifecycle marketing for a long time and for a good reason. According to a recent survey by Salesforce, 66% of customers expect a company to understand their needs. 

To do this at scale, an AI chatbot can:

• Understand Purchasing Behavior – The AI can pull data from your backend to understand the products and services that your customers have preferred in the past and make decisions on how to interact with them. 
• Identify Common Problems – An AI chatbot can provide solutions that best service the user’s use case by investigating previous conversations and remembering the context from the current one. 
• Predict Future Patterns – If you can identify the common troubleshooting areas for a person and see their past behavior, you can also predict future problems they might face. AI can perform this analysis and provide proactive solutions to the customers.

When you provide these data points, your AI chatbots understand the user better and proactively support them. Overall, this helps boost your customer experience because the customer feels like you’re catering to their needs. 

4. Training on Brand Voice and Tone

Since customer support is a human-first discipline, support conversations can often be ad-hoc and specific to the human agent handling it. However, this usually creates another problem, where the customer becomes disconnected from the brand that is selling the product. 

Maintaining a consistent voice and tone when you talk with the customer is essential to foster familiarity and help them solve their problems. 

If you train them on your brand voice and tone, WhatsApp AI chatbots can be more consistent. This is done by giving specific instructions to the chatbot and training it on the documents from your brand. By understanding and identifying patterns in the voice and tone you use in your documents and blogs and following your instructions, the chatbot can provide personalized support while maintaining the overall brand voice and tone. 

5. Enabling Chatbot-Human Handoff

While AI systems are pretty advanced and can answer most repetitive questions (taking care of up to 80% of the volume), you need human intervention to solve the more complex problems. 

Most vendors provide some level of chatbot-human handoff features. This allows you to automatically transfer a particular conversation to a human agent when the chatbot fails to answer a question. In the context of WhatsApp, you will need to train the chatbot to understand spaces where it can’t answer a question.

When the chatbot can differentiate between the questions it can answer and those that can’t, the fallback system works much better and can be fruitful overall. 

6. Implementing Feedback Loops

Finally, one of the most critical features of Whatsapp business chatbots is that they learn with time. You need to keep incorporating feedback into your training to improve the chatbot’s function. There are multiple ways to do this:

• Analyzing Post-Chat Surveys – Adding a survey to understand how the customer felt about the chatbot will help you quickly understand problem areas. Train your chatbot to answer questions more concisely and give your customers more value as your chatbots evolve. 
• Performing Sentiment Analysis – With the advanced NLP systems in the chatbot, you can understand the customer’s emotions when interacting with your bots. Using this data as a cue, you can design more empathetic conversations.
• Understanding Open-Ended Feedback – You can use a document-based chatbot to find patterns within your reviews. These patterns will then translate into actionable data insights that you can use to provide targeted training to your chatbot.

There are sophisticated mechanisms to incorporate improvements into chatbots. Algorithms employing RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) and PPO (Proximity Policy Optimization) can help your models improve with time. 

Here’s a quick video about WhatsApp chatbots for business.

However, even if your vendor doesn’t provide these exact features for improving your whatsapp business, retraining them on newer data and adding more context will help them provide better support. 

To wrap up, we’ve covered key strategies for training your WhatsApp Business chatbot to enhance customer interactions and deliver a better experience. If you prefer a quick summary, watch the video below for a concise recap of the main points discussed in this article.

Some Thoughts

WhatsApp is one of the best channels for delivering customer support. Due to the sheer size of the audience available on the platform, it can become a preferred channel for many of your customers. 

Building a chatbot for this wide demographic may seem challenging, but there are pretty intuitive and straightforward principles that you can use to make Whatsapp business more functional. In this article, we discuss the basic tenets of conversation design, personalization, iterative feedback loops, human handoff, maintenance of brand tonality, and using customer data. These techniques can help you design a Whatsapp chatbot that keeps delighting your customers.