WhatsApp with Salesforce Integration: Explained

At Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce and WhatsApp announced a game changing strategic partnership that would allow Salesforce customers to connect with their customers seamlessly and empower them to deliver new messaging experiences on WhatsApp.

With 2 billion users, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app on the planet. And Salesforce is the world’s No 1 CRM platform. And when these two come together, the benefits of both will be amplified. WhatsApp integration with Salesforce boosts customer satisfaction and increases your brand loyalty. The Salesforce-WhatsApp integration is a solution from Salesforce that lays emphasis on delivering an integrated, connected omnichannel experience to its users.

WhatsApp business messaging from Salesforce will bring Salesforce’s best-in-class CRM capabilities to deliver convenient, fresh, and personalized experiences to customers worldwide. This seamless integration will transform how brands engage with their customers across marketing, sales, and service interactions.

The new integration will empower businesses to customize their experience effortlessly and connect with their customers in a fast, engaging and personal way to promote and sell products and provide support. This would in turn improve brand engagement and loyalty, improve convenience, boost interaction, and augment customer service.  

How WhatsApp with Salesforce boosts customer engagement, loyalty and revenue

Salesforce’s key Cloud offerings namely Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud apps will integrate with WhatsApp to drive promotional and customer service messaging, and sometime soon into the future, integrate conversation based transactional commerce capabilities. This will allow businesses to transform their relationships with their customers across millions of conversations by personalizing the messaging experience for every customer, at scale. This will allow Salesforce customers to engage audiences on WhatsApp, fast track sales, and drive a far more effective and efficient customer service experience. Features of this integration include:

Create an end-to-end customer journey: Using Journey Builder and WhatsApp, Salesforce customers can create, exchange, and manage interactions with customers throughout their journey to deliver a seamless customer experience. For instance, customers may receive a reminder message on WhatsApp about an upcoming order delivery in the coming week. As an upsell promo, the message could include a discount coupon of 25% for a related product. The user could then confirm in a single click if they wish to add this new product to their next order.

Personalize every interaction with the Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform (CDP): With Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform, Salesforce customers will be able to personalize real time marketing interactions on WhatsApp with first-party customer data. Salesforce based Whatsapp messaging will leverage AI driven insights from across Salesforce and other sources to personalize customer engagement with smart promotions, and recommendations, across every interaction, at scale. Brands can also easily activate audiences directly through the Marketing Cloud CDP, to target high-value segments or new audiences with Click-to-WhatsApp ads on social media to drive customers to a one-to-one messaging experience.

Enhance selling and service conversations with automation and AI: With the partnership between Salesforce and WhatsApp, businesses can significantly reduce support wait times and improve overall efficiency with automated personal interactions through messaging on WhatsApp. Salesforce customers using tools like automation and AI-powered chatbots have seen a significant increase in customer satisfaction, agent productivity, customer retention, and case resolution.

Enrich customer conversations: Salesforce customers will be able to use customizable templates for messages that include brand media such as product videos and images, or display products and services with interactive textual content that allow consumers to view and buy products through WhatsApp. Customizable buttons allow users to take action with a single tap.

Default Privacy and security: Privacy and security is at the heart of WhatsApp. Every WhatsApp message sent between businesses and their customers is protected by the best in class Signal encryption protocol that secures messages before they leave your device

How to connect WhatsApp to Salesforce

Before your customers can send you messages from WhatsApp, and you can reply from the Salesforce console, you need to have a Salesforce account and a verified Facebook Business Manager account. Along with that, there are some other requirements that you need to fulfill:

• Have Salesforce Classic or Lightning Experience.
• Have a Digital Engagement license
• Have a Service Cloud license
• Have a Chat user license.
• Have an approved WhatsApp Business account.

1. To set up your WhatsApp account on Facebook Business Manager, send an email to WhatsAppEnablement@salesforce.com with the subject “WhatsApp Number Setup.” Include the information listed below in the body of your email:

• Salesforce Org ID.
• Facebook Business Manager ID.
• The name associated with your Facebook Business Manager ID.
• The WhatsApp number
• The Name and email address associated with the number
• The company name you want to display on WhatsApp
• Company description, logo, and website URL (optional)

2. Going to your WhatsApp channel in Lightning Experience

Go to Lightning Experience settings. Write “Messaging” in the search bar and select “Messaging Settings.” Go to “Channels,”  and you should automatically see WhatsApp.

Automating Customer support with Einstein Bots

With this new partnership between Salesforce and WhatsApp, WhatsApp will have access to Einstein Bots. Business teams can program or automate messages on WhatsApp just like on Facebook Messenger or with standard SMS messages. 

Einstein Bots is an AI tool from Salesforce designed to create bots to assist customer service teams to manage customer queries and issues. Einstein bots allow you to answer questions on routine cases, while freeing up agents o that they can work on more complex customer issues.

In Salesforce, you will need to install your company’s WhatsApp within Einstein Bots. Once you complete that setup, go to the main Bot Builder page and complete the following steps:

• In the Channel Menu click on “Add”
• Select WhatsApp in the channel options
• In the Deployment field select the channel name

This functionality will make automating specific answers very straightforward to try to help customers before they even speak to an agent. Customers can make queries over WhatsApp while receiving automated responses in real-time, all leading to significant time saved for the customer support staff.

Today customers spend more time than ever on their devices, and they want to interact with brands on the world’s most popular messaging app. Most self-employed professionals are already doing that. And it’s a matter of time before medium-sized and large corporations follow suit.

Now brands and enterprises can communicate with their customers over WhatsApp with the following benefits:

• Implement in real-time.
• Implement in an organized way.
• Get access to official support from WhatsApp.
• Get real time AI driven performance analytics.
• Get the entire history of customer interactions.
• Easily map contact center agent traceability.
• Drive case resolution efficiency and boost productivity.
• Significantly improve SLAs
• Automate responses, alerts, and notifications with Einstein Bots.

This partnership between Salesforce and WhatsApp is transforming how businesses and brands communicate with their customers to enhance the customer experience through personalization delivering a seamless experience privately and securely.

Girikon is a Gold Certified Salesforce Consulting Partner and can help you transform your sales, marketing and customer service activities by integrating the World’s No1 CRM platform with the world’s most powerful messaging platform. Contact us to day to know more.

About Author

Indranil Chakraborty

Indranil is a technology enthusiast with over 25 years of experience in project management, operations, technology and business development. Indranil has led project teams in egovernance, business process re-engineering, product development and worked with Government and Corporate customers. Indranil truly believes in the power of technology to drive productivity and growth for teams and businesses.