How to bring WhatsApp into your business

Most businesses we speak to know they should be doing something with WhatsApp. Fewer know where to start. The good news is that you do not need a big project. You need one simple first step, and a sensible order for what comes after it.

This is the approach we recommend, and it is how we implement WhatsApp with our own customers.

Nine out of ten people already use WhatsApp. There is no app to download and nothing new to learn. Your customers have it open all day.

Increasingly, they use it for work as well. People message the businesses they buy from in the same way they message everyone else, and they expect a reply.

The free versions of WhatsApp were never built for that. They tie conversations to one phone and one person, and they do not connect to your other systems. The WhatsApp Business API addresses those limitations. It gives a business one managed channel that a whole team, and your software, can work through.

On top of that come two newer capabilities. Flows let a customer complete a form or a short journey inside the chat. AI lets the channel understand a question and answer it. Together they turn WhatsApp from a messaging app into a serious business tool.

Business WhatsApp comes in three types:

• Inbound customer service: customers message you, and you answer.
• Outbound marketing: you send promotions and content to customers.
• Outbound utility: you send one-to-one updates about a customer’s own orders and account.

All three are worth having. Our advice is to start with inbound, because it is the easiest to set up and the quickest to prove.

3

Add utility

The final step is utility: one-to-one messages that are specific to each customer. This is where WhatsApp starts to carry the day-to-day running of the account:

• order updates
• delivery status
• paying invoices
• credit control