WhatsApp Salesforce Partnership: How Businesses Can Benefit from This?

Summary

Mark Zuckerberg announced a strategic partnership between one of its Meta products ‘WhatsApp’ and Salesforce on September 20, 2022, through a post. He announced how WhatsApp’s cloud API can be leveraged by businesses to improve customer experience, support, and marketing efforts.

Businesses using Salesforce now can enable WhatsApp messaging to connect with their customers more seamlessly to address queries/ issues or notify them of order processing, sales, discounts, etc.

With this integration, Salesforce businesses can personalize their customer interactions significantly and connect to a broader audience segment. In this blog, we will talk more about Salesforce integration with WhatsApp and what it means for businesses.

So, without further ado, let’s begin!

What Led to Salesforce WhatsApp Partnership?

With approximately 2 Billion users on WhatsApp, it has become a globally recognized instant messaging app with its presence across 180 countries. Considering the gaining popularity of the platform, Meta Platforms released the WhatsApp Business application in 2018 to help individual proprietors and small businesses with effective communication and marketing efforts.

To further expand its use, Meta Platforms announced that the WhatsApp cloud API will be made available for businesses of all scales and sizes on 19th May 2022. Evidently, they have been laying the foundation for this integration to broaden the horizons of WhatsApp Business.

Mark Zuckerberg also said how customers prefer connecting with businesses over text, with respect to the partnership.

But, what led Salesforce to partner with WhatsApp?

For any business to expand its reach beyond its geographical regions would mean tapping into the local telecom providers of each country. The process is obviously tedious and became a significant reason why many business units wouldn’t prefer it.

Targeting the pain points of such business units, this partnership was led. With Salesforce and WhatsApp integration, business units can now reach global clients, address their concerns/queries, and build better relationships.

What Does This WhatsApp-Salesforce Integration Mean for Businesses?

Salesforce’s digital engagement with WhatsApp helps businesses manage interactions with leads through a single interface seamlessly. The new partnership can help businesses improve the way they approach a client in various sectors.

For instance, customers using Salesforce for the real estate sector can easily get in touch with potential leads about any newly available property. Or, in eCommerce, business units can use WhatsApp to notify customers about their abandoned products in cart and exclusive deals to convert them. So, there are unseen possibilities that one can achieve here.

Nowadays, most companies are implementing business on WhatsApp to increase sales and know customers’ requirements.

Let’s look at the various ways this partnership can benefit businesses! But before that, let’s see how Salesforce development companies are reacting to it.

Personalized interactions with customers

Amongst the many announcements made in Dreamforce ‘22, the introduction of Salesforce Genie has piqued the interest of several enterprises. Now, Salesforce marketing cloud WhatsApp enables businesses to interact with customers based on trusted real-time consumer data.

Powered by these AI insights and real-time data, businesses can send personalized messages for the promotion of their products and services. They can do it seamlessly through the marketing cloud CDP (customer data platform) only.

With single-tap WhatsApp ads across social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc., business units can drive their customers to one-to-one interaction.

End-to-end customer journey

Today’s customers prefer to be informed about every part of a product purchase process or brand interaction journey. And Salesforce integration with WhatsApp marketing ensures a customer is well informed throughout the journey.

Whether it is informing them of their order status, adding a new product to the cart, or offering them a discount for the next purchase, Salesforce businesses can now quickly connect with customers.

Trigger lead conversion

Businesses can use custom templates with brand images and videos featuring their products and services to improve their lead conversion rate. With the power of instant messaging through WhatsApp and other Customer 360 tools, one can lead to single-tap interactions or trigger action for users to open the product page and continue with the purchase.

Don’t believe in the power of messaging yet, hear it from Peter Chan!

Improved customer service conversations with automation and AI

According to a survey report, about 83% of respondents believe that AI can help them serve more customers and assist them better. With automation, AI, and the features of WhatsApp with Salesforce, it is now possible to improve the customer experience and service. Enterprises can address the issues of a client seamlessly over text messages.

Security and privacy

We all use WhatsApp on a daily basis and it is needless to talk about the security and privacy controls it offers to us users. Every text and conversation between the customer and enterprise is end-to-end encrypted and ensures maximum security.

How Salesforce Integrates with WhatsApp?

The new Salesforce and WhatsApp integration is not just about pushing promotional messages to prospective customers. It’s beyond that!

I was so impacted by a recent trip to Latin America, seeing the impact of @WhatsApp on everything from commerce to finance.

With our announcement today, Salesforce will support WhatsApp-first messaging for customer conversations across Customer 360 https://t.co/lHYcZKFydG

— Bret Taylor (@btaylor) September 20, 2022

It is about personalizing customer interactions and exploring growth opportunities for business communications. But, how do you do that? WhatsApp enables two ways for Salesforce users to utilize this operation.

• Pre-approved messages/ notifications

In this form of interaction, businesses seek pre-approval from their customers to send personalized messages, order status, payment confirmation, order cancellation, updates, etc.

• Customer care interactions

This kind of interaction is initiated by the customers to ask queries or address issues via WhatsApp messages. Based on the type of query/concern, a support agent is assigned to further proceed with the conversation. One can also use tools like Salesforce Einstein to automate this customer support process.

That’s all about Salesforce and WhatsApp integration from our end. To further implement this new technology into your business system, you need to connect to a reputed Salesforce development company.

In this context, team BiztechCS might be of help with our in-house certified Salesforce professionals. They will walk you through the steps of implementation.

Final Thoughts

About 67% of customers prefer using a messaging app when connecting to a business. This led to the very foundation of using a globally-recognized instant messaging app as secure and robust as WhatsApp with Salesforce CRM.

Announced about two days ago, this WhatsApp and Salesforce news has become quite popular owing to the numerous benefits it boasts. Whether it is improving customer interaction, lead conversion, or fostering personalization, the partnership is likely to do wonders in the days to come.

Rest, it will depend upon the Salesforce implementation partners how well they can adapt to the merger and innovate on new and better ways of using it.