Driving conversion with WhatsApp Flows

Consórcio Magalu has more than 1,400 locations and 98,000 active customers across Brazil. For more than 30 years, it’s helped Brazilians realize their financial goals through “consórcios,” loans that make it possible for consumers to purchase cars, real estate, appliances and other goods or services as part of a group. Each customer pays a monthly installment toward the same type of good or service, with the option to acquire their item in one of three ways: completing the loan term, placing a winning bid, or winning a monthly raffle to pay off their individual loan.

Challenge: High abandonment rate by users when booking through the scheduling system

Under the previous booking system, potential customers were redirected from WhatsApp to a calendar-based mobile-web experience to complete their booking. But this transition resulted in a 92% abandonment rate. The team wanted to automate the process entirely through WhatsApp to minimize drop off, customer wait times, and the need for agent intervention.

For Consórcio Magalu, an important first step in attracting new customers is making it easy for them to meet with bank representatives who can answer their loan questions. Unfortunately, the previous booking experience, which directed visitors to a site outside of WhatsApp after they’d already made contact within the app, was causing friction and a significant dropoff in traffic.

Solution: Building a new, end-to-end user experience entirely within WhatsApp

Consórcio Magalu knew it needed to find a more simple and intuitive approach that would make it easier for visitors to book appointments. To do this, they teamed up with Sinch to implement WhatsApp Flows, a solution that can help businesses design, build, and customize user journeys, which can make chatbot and AI agent solutions better for customers and help brands create more engaging experiences. The team used WhatsApp Flows to build a new, end-to-end user booking experience entirely within WhatsApp. The team then implemented this updated experience for both existing customers and potential new customers who’d previously made an inquiry about loans on the website.

The new experience was shared with both organic site visitors and visitors from paid marketing sources. The first WhatsApp message notified each potential customer of latest loan terms for real estate, car, motorcycle, services, electronics and furniture loans. It also listed the company’s business hours and encouraged the person to schedule an appointment by tapping the “Book now” button. A follow-up message directed the customer to find a date or time for their appointment by tapping “Check options.” Next, the customer entered a WhatsApp Flow to choose the date, time, and type of appointment (in-person, video call or phone call) that worked best for them, with just a few simple taps.

Result: Higher conversion and higher customer satisfaction with a more seamless and intuitive scheduling process

By keeping the booking experience entirely within WhatsApp, Consórcio Magalu was able to drive more conversions from both organic and paid site traffic than in its previous booking approach. They reported higher customer satisfaction scores from appointment bookings with WhatsApp Flows compared to its original booking setup too. 

By making the user experience more seamless and convenient they saw:

• 2.9x higher conversions for scheduled appointments among organic visitors
• 49% more conversions among paid site traffic
• 21% increase in customer satisfaction

“WhatsApp Flows allowed us to redesign our customer booking experience in a much more intuitive way that was fast and simple. Customers can now select appointment dates and times faster, without having to leave their WhatsApp chat thread. This has led to more leads booking appointments and created higher customer satisfaction,” said Letícia Vilela Bertolini and Leonardo Osório from Consórcio Magalu. 

“WhatsApp Flows is an innovative feature that makes tasks like logins, appointment bookings, filling out forms and finding nearby locations much easier and more practical. It’s truly a game changer for how businesses can prioritize WhatsApp as a strategic channel to engage with users. We’re very confident Flows can help enhance the customer experience, which is why we build Flows into the chatbot journeys of many of our clients. We’re excited about how Flows improved performance for Consórcio Magalu and we’re planning to help drive even more growth for them using this solution,” said Carolina Guerrero from Sinch.