Salesforce and Meta will collaborate to develop a business messaging platform based on WhatsApp.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, and CEO of Meta announced a partnership with the software provider Salesforce on Tuesday. As a result, businesses using their platform will be able to use WhatsApp business messages to interact directly with customers, respond to inquiries, and conduct marketing campaigns.
The capabilities of WhatsApp’s Cloud API will be made available to all Salesforce customers worldwide, allowing them to simply manage their businesses across all Salesforce Customer 360 applications and to deliver new experiences directly on WhatsApp. According to Salesforce’s General Manager of Messaging, Michael Affronti, “Our customers are engaging audiences in the US and around the world, so they need to continually look for ways to improve the customer experience by connecting every customer touchpoint into a source of truth to create truly personalized experiences, at scale.” Salesforce wants to provide its customers access to WhatsApp-first business messaging as a new way to sell, market, and provide support directly from a chat to boost customer engagement, speed up sales, and improve customer service results. Every Salesforce customer can now offer personalized and interactive customer experiences that boost sales, enhance customer service, and engage customers wherever they are thanks to WhatsApp-first business messaging, said Affronti. The software company also disclosed that texting is the preferred medium for client engagement and the next big thing in consumer engagement. It also stated that 66% of internet adults worldwide choose texting as a method of communication with businesses and that 90% of customers believe that a company’s experiences are just as essential as its goods or services. Salesforce claims that WhatsApp-first business messaging would enable firms to provide simple, seamless, and individualized interactions between consumers and businesses throughout the world. In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg stated that people are increasingly choosing to communicate with companies via text. Because of this, they introduced Cloud API earlier this year and are currently collaborating with Salesforce. With the new connectivity, businesses will be able to manage communication directly from the Salesforce platform while developing experiences for WhatsApp chats with clients. “We continue to invest in ways to make it quick and easy for businesses to get up and running on WhatsApp,” said Matthew Idema, vice president of business messaging at Meta. “We want more people to benefit from faster, richer interactions.” Many more companies will be able to use WhatsApp to communicate with their consumers easily thanks to a partnership with Salesforce, the leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform in the world, claimed the firm. For instance, as part of the integration’s pilot program, L’Oreal group brands will utilize WhatsApp to contact customers who had previously abandoned shopping cart items and will send them coupons and offers directly on the chat thread, according to the business. Zuckerberg said in May that the WhatsApp Cloud API (application programming interface), hosted by the parent firm, will make the mobile messaging service available to companies of all sizes worldwide to further advance Meta-WhatsApp business integration. According to Salesforce, this partnership will revolutionize how brands interact naturally with customers throughout marketing, retail, and service engagements. The company added that using the “brand-new Genie,” a revolutionary data platform that powers the first real-time CRM and provides seamless, highly individualized experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce, businesses will directly engage with their customers. According to the company, this will enable businesses or brands to target audiences using real-time data that will fuel Click-to-WhatsApp advertising on Facebook and Instagram and lead users to a one-to-one conversation experience.
With this change, any company or developer will have easy access to the service and will be able to use the secure WhatsApp Cloud API to build directly on top of WhatsApp to personalize their experience and respond to consumers more quickly. The startup will give free, secure cloud hosting services from Meta to businesses using WhatsApp.
