New Salesforce-WhatsApp Integration Brings Marketing and Service Conversations Together

Salesforce has announced the general availability of Unified Conversations for WhatsApp, which transforms one-way marketing promotions or service requests into dynamic, two-way conversations from a single WhatsApp number.

Now, instead of managing separate threads for promotions and support, customers can automatically receive personalized opt-in marketing promotions and individual support all within a single WhatsApp chat between a brand and customer.

This allows companies like Agibank to use data stored in Salesforce from across their more than 900 hubs within WhatsApp to deliver personalized loan proposals, resolve concerns faster, and better support customers — all in a single conversation.

Why it matters: Seventy-nine percent of customers expect consistent interactions across departments and 75% want to communicate with brands using messaging. However, businesses aren’t meeting these expectations. Customers report that disconnected experiences are their top frustration when dealing with an organization.

Salesforce perspective: “With more than two billion people using WhatsApp today, Salesforce’s new Unified Conversations for WhatsApp enables brands to connect with their customers where they are and have a single, connected, and trusted experience,” said Steve Hammond, EVP and GM, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. “This helps brands break down barriers across their company and build stronger relationships throughout their customer’s journey, including natural handoffs from marketing to service teams, by driving the right personalized engagement, no matter where they are in the customer journey, at the right time and in the right context.”

Go deeper: Unified Conversations for WhatsApp is powered by Salesforce Data Cloud. Data Cloud allows companies to bring all of their trapped data into Salesforce and build a unified customer profile across all products, services, and interactions. This allows marketers and service agents to work off the same, shared customer profile and provides them with the relevant context needed to deliver trusted experiences across both departments in a single chat thread.

Innovation in action: By combining marketing and service conversations together in Unified Conversations for WhatsApp:

  • Marketers can segment audiences and create content for marketing campaigns while giving service agents a window into customers’ interactions to provide recommended next best actions using a single WhatsApp number.
  • Inside one WhatsApp conversation, healthcare organizations can schedule, confirm, and provide follow-up support for procedures and appointments.
  • Financial service institutions can prevent fraud by offering a single experience in WhatsApp to proactively verify and provide assistance for unusual transactions.
  • Travelers can respond to personalized trip offers and book experiences through chatbot-powered prompts in WhatsApp.

Customer perspective:

“Our customers rely on WhatsApp as a primary way to engage with us. By unifying our data in Salesforce to deliver experiences in WhatsApp, we’ve been able to improve our user experience to personalize loan proposals, resolve concerns, and support customers. Salesforce’s earlier marketing integration with WhatsApp helped us triple digital sales and we are eager to do more.” – Matheus Girardi, Chief Marketing and Customer Officer, Agibank

“WhatsApp is the preferred messaging app for our students across Brazil. We look forward to learning more about Unified Conversation and how we can engage and service them better through WhatsApp and converting leads faster with this new feature.” – Roberto Maia, Chief Information Officer, YDUQS

Availability:

Unified Conversations for WhatsApp is generally available now.

More information:

Visit https://www.salesforce.com/