Meta's WhatsApp partners with Salesforce to help ‘businesses chat directly with customers’

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced a new strategic partnership between Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp and software company Salesforce. The company claims that this “integration will help businesses build experiences to chat with customers on WhatsApp, while being able to manage communication directly from the Salesforce platform.”

Zuckerberg, in a Facebook post, said: “We’re partnering with Salesforce so all businesses that use their platform can use WhatsApp business messages to answer customer questions, run marketing campaigns, and sell directly in chat. More and more people prefer to communicate with businesses over text. That's why we launched our Cloud API earlier this year and are now partnering with Salesforce.”

Salesforce integration with WhatsApp Business Platform for Marketing Cloud is expected to be available in December 2022, with additional integrations expected to be available in the following months.

Whatsapp is making its Cloud API’s capabilities available to all Salesforce customers globally, which will enable the software company’s customers to offer new experiences right on WhatsApp and easily manage businesses across Salesforce Customer 360 applications.

Michael Affronti, General Manager of Messaging at Salesforce, said, “Our customers are engaging audiences in the US and globally, which requires them to constantly find ways to improve the customer experience by connecting every customer touchpoint into a source of truth to create truly personalized experiences, at scale.”

Salesforce aims to offer WhatsApp-first business messaging to its customers as a new way to sell, market, and support right from a conversation to increase customer engagement, accelerate sales, and drive better customer support outcomes.

"Whatsapp-first business messaging enables every Salesforce customer to provide personal and conversational experiences that increase sales, improve customer service, and engage customers wherever they are,” added Affronti.

The software company also revealed that messaging is the next great customer engagement frontier and preferred customer engagement channel. It added that according to 90 per cent of customers, the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services, and 66 per cent of online adults globally prefer messaging as a way of communicating with a business.

According to Salesforce, WhatsApp-first business messaging would bring the companies’ capability to deliver convenient, integrated, and personalised experiences between people and businesses, worldwide.

Asmita Dubey, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at L’Oréal, said, “As more customers use their mobile devices as their primary way to engage our brand, we need a single messaging solution that pulls in information across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT, to help us deliver personalised customer service, deliver product recommendations, and increase sales. Being able to do all of the above on WhatsApp as a single messaging platform could have a tremendous opportunity in beauty, to drive conversational commerce and build greater engagement.

Salesforce further stated that this integration will transform how brands connect seamlessly with consumers through conversational engagement across marketing, commerce, and service interactions. "And, companies will activate their customers directly through the brand-new Genie, a new data platform powering the world's first real-time CRM that delivers seamless, highly personalised experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce,” it said.

This would enable companies to target audiences with real-time data that will inform Click-to-WhatsApp ads on Facebook and Instagram to drive customers to a one-to-one messaging experience, it added.

Matt Idema, VP of Business Messaging at Meta, said, “Our expanded partnership with Salesforce is an exciting milestone, and it will significantly scale our ability to help brands offer even better customer experiences on WhatsApp. Between our two companies, we share the belief that messaging is the next era for businesses, and together we’ll help more brands get started with WhatsApp to increase customer engagement, accelerate sales, and drive better outcomes for their business and for their customers.”