WhatsApp Integration

Problem

The bank’s re-engagement ran on SMS and email, and both only fired halfway through the application journey. Anyone who stalled before that point was never contacted at all. No reminder, no offer of help, nothing.

Outcome

The Challenge

Most home loan applicants don’t abandon because they’ve changed their mind. They abandon because the moment gets hard — a document they don’t have on hand, a field they’re not sure how to answer, a step that needs a detail they’ll have to go and find.

Existing re-engagement couldn’t reach those moments. It fired on a schedule, not on behaviour.

Objectives

• Reach people at the moment of friction — not at a fixed point in the funnel.
• Match the message to the customer — different drop-off behaviour needs different content and timing.
• Stay compliant and non-intrusive — every message governed by Meta’s Business Messaging Policy.
• Prove it inside three months — scoped as a Proof of Concept with a defined window.

What I did

Before designing anything, I mapped the existing journey end to end — every digital touchpoint, and where in the funnel the SMS and email triggers fired. Then I went through the home loan application analytics page by page, rather than looking at the funnel as a single conversion number.

The question wasn’t just when customers dropped off. It was where intervention would actually be effective. Usability testing ran alongside the analytics, so both drop-off points were backed by quantitative and qualitative evidence.

Key insights

Two pages surfaced immediately as the highest-friction moments in the entire application.

• Property Details — applicants without an offer to purchase stalled here, with nothing prompting them to return once they had one.
• Document Upload — documents had to be gathered offline, so the application stalled while people went to find them.

Designing the conversation

I designed 12 conversational pieces, each mapped to a specific moment and a specific customer state rather than a single generic nudge.

Three of the twelve:

Working inside Meta’s policy

WhatsApp is Meta’s platform: every template — its exact copy, format and permitted interaction pattern — is submitted and approved before it reaches a customer.

Certain conversation types can’t be initiated freely, template copy has hard limits, and patterns that feel natural to a designer get flagged. Getting all 12 approved was a design discipline in its own right.

Results

The Proof of Concept concluded on schedule and delivered the uplift it set out to test.

The two drop-off points identified at the start proved to be the highest-leverage moments to intervene, which validated the page-by-page approach over a single funnel view.

Lessons

Know Your Customer pre-population was scoped out, not designed out. Pre-populating the application for existing customers takes real work off the person filling it in, and it is the first thing I would activate in a full rollout. The uplift was achieved without it.

Conversational UX isn’t simpler than interface UX. Take away the screen and the complexity doesn’t disappear. It moves into language, timing and flow logic.