Interakt Review: How Does It Serve To D2C Brands?

Are you considering Interakt to set up your WhatsApp commerce? If yes, then we'll help you make a decision right here. 

This Interakt review will help you understand all the positives & negatives of Interakt as a WhatsApp Marketing platform for your e-commerce store.

We've already reviewed some of the best Interakt competitors in this series. Check them out or bookmark them if you're interested.

WATI's review as a WhatsApp marketing platform

Pros & cons of LimeChat 

Is Zoko a complete WhatsApp marketing platform for D2C brands?

Let's now dive straight into Interakt's offerings.

Interakt Review 2023:

What is Interakt? A CRM or a multi-agent team inbox for WhatsApp?

Interakt works as a WhatsApp-based CRM for businesses & allows e-commerce stores (including Shopify) to access a set of features essential for WhatsApp marketing. 

These features include automated WhatsApp notifications, catalogues on WhatsApp, bulk promotional campaigns and analytics.

Features provided by Interakt

(rating 4/5)

The USP of Interakt is WhatsApp CRM + team inbox. It offers a variety of features like automated replies, quick replies, bulk campaigns & notifications. 

It can be utilised for both customer support & marketing purposes.

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Pros

Automated notifications & auto-replies: You can set up welcome messages, action-based triggers & automated notifications.

Broadcast & marketing campaigns: You can set up marketing campaigns based on events & custom attributes.

Shared team inbox: Interakt allows you to use WhatsApp as a customer support channel. You can set up a multi-agent login on a single WhatsApp number and access the support team inbox.

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Cons

Like WATI & Zoko, the main disadvantage of Interakt is that it is only available for WhatsApp. 

If your buyers explore your products across other platforms like email, Instagram, and Messenger, you'll require other platforms to set up support & marketing for these channels. This will add more to your marketing costs & efficiency.

Interakt doesn't offer pre-approved WhatsApp templates to get started.

Re-targeting campaigns are absent: Interakt doesn't allow you to re-target shoppers who browse a product but don't add it to the cart on WhatsApp. Similarly, you can’t retarget people who’ve added to the cart but did not checkout.

BiteSpeed offers a complete multi-channel support inbox & all these marketing features (which Interakt misses) for Shopify stores under a single dashboard. It'll help you launch personalised marketing campaigns across channels efficiently.

Read: Why is BiteSpeed the best alternative to Interakt?

Onboarding & setup time

(rating 3/5)

‍Onboarding is slow & can take up to 1 week. 

Interakt has tedious manual work. You constantly juggle with the export/import of CSV files for different operations like contact management etc.

Hard to build & manage chatbot flows. Building chatbot flow is a complex process with multiple "AND" / "OR" rules.

Interakt's Pricing: 

(rating 3/5)

Interakt's base monthly plan starts at INR 999 + taxes but lacks advanced marketing campaign features such as custom filters & user segmentation. The absence of these features makes stores opt for Interakt’s high-tier plans.‍

Segmented marketing campaigns help you personalise campaigns based on different cohorts. This feature is a must to have for D2C brands to maximise ROI by speaking to the customers about new products, cash backs & rewards and order updates. BiteSpeed offers segmented marketing campaigns in all pricing tiers. 

Chat automation features are limited in lower-tier plans. Automated custom replies are available only in top-tier plans.

WhatsApp chatbot and analytics are essential for WhatsApp commerce but these two features are not available in any of their plans.

Customer support at Interakt

(rating 2/5)

‍Interakt offers support to its customers only over email.

• The base plan offers 48 hours of SLA for support while higher-tier plans offer 24 hours of SLA for Support.
• Support over WhatsApp is unavailable.
• No mention of telephonic support & dedicated account manager in the 'Growth' & 'Advanced' plans. Large businesses usually look for that.

Targeted Ideal Customers

Interakt aims to serve SMBs, enterprises & e-commerce stores. It offers a shared team inbox for WhatsApp communication & marketing so your entire team can get online to assist with customer support.

Interakt would be a good fit for:

B2C and D2C businesses looking to make WhatsApp their key customer support channel.

Businesses primarily looking to explore WhatsApp for regular communication & notifications.

Dedicated features for e-commerce

(rating 3/5)

Interakt does offer some dedicated e-commerce features including-

1. Shopify & Woocommerce plugins that help you integrate your store with the platform.
2. WhatsApp catalogue enables customers to shop for products from your business’ inventory on WhatsApp.

All other features including automated notifications, quick replies etc mentioned throughout the post are available to e-commerce businesses too.

Interakt offers limited marketing features for e-commerce. It doesn’t offer essential features including retargeting campaigns, chatbots to collect first-party information about your customers, a multi-channel support inbox, and the ability to automate 70% of your support queries. 

Missing out on these features can impact your sales numbers.

BiteSpeed helps you track the exact number of sales and revenue each of your marketing campaigns drove for the Shopify store.

BiteSpeed also offers other essential E-commerce-specific features such as-

• COD to prepaid nudges
• Cross-sell & up-sell campaigns
• Spin the wheel & checkout exit pop-ups
• Assisted shopping experience
• Discount & live chat widgets 

These features help not only in re-engaging, retaining and re-targeting customers but also generating more sales & revenue. 

Conclusion: Should you consider Interakt for your e-commerce Store?

(overall rating 3/5)

Interakt does offer basic communication features to e-commerce but lacks essential features such as omnichannel automated re-marketing campaigns, COD to prepaid and many more that we’ve discussed in the previous section.

Interakt’s team inbox is as good as WATI's. It also offers a very similar set of features to businesses looking to invest in WhatsApp for support & business communication.

Interakt is an easy recommendation for businesses that are looking for a WhatsApp-only solution. It provides all the necessary features & integrations required including chatbots, broadcasts, APIs, Web-hooks, and third-party automation tools, you should go for it.

If you’re looking for a multi-channel marketing solution for your D2C store, Interakt will not be the ideal solution.

You can Join A Demo to explore how BiteSpeed will drive up to 230-50% more revenue to your Shopify store.

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