• Salesforce will offer WhatsApp-first business messaging to 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
• Messaging is the next great customer engagement frontier and preferred customer engagement channel – 90% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services, and 66% of online adults globally prefer messaging as a way of communicating with a business
• Salesforce customers like L’Oreal will transform their customer engagement through a WhatsApp branded experience that allows for faster, richer interactions; continuous and persistent conversations; and 24/7 support – all within a messaging thread

At Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce, the #1 CRM provider worldwide, and WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service in the world, announced a new strategic partnership that will allow Salesforce customers to connect with their customers and build new messaging experiences on WhatsApp.

WhatsApp-first business messaging will bring the companies’ best-in-class capabilities to deliver modern, convenient, integrated, and personalized experiences between people and businesses, worldwide. 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 Salesforce Genie, a new data platform powering the world’s first real-time CRM that delivers seamless, highly personalized experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce. This enables companies to target those audiences with real-time data that informs Click-to-WhatsApp ads on Facebook and Instagram to drive customers to a one-to-one messaging experience.

The new integration will enable brands to easily customize their experience to connect with their customers in a fast, simple, and personal way to answer questions, provide support, and promote and sell products. This increases engagement, loyalty, convenience, interaction, and satisfaction for both the brand and the customer.

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“L’Oreal is on a mission to invent the future of beauty, which also requires us to revolutionize how we connect with our customers around the world. Our customers move fast – we not only have to keep up but exceed their expectations across every interaction. 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 personalized 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,” said Asmita Dubey, Chief Digital & Marketing Officer at L’Oréal.

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

Asmita Dubey, Chief Digital & Marketing Officer at L’Oréal

Messaging is the next great customer engagement frontier and a preferred customer engagement channel – 66% of online adults agree that messaging is their preferred way of communicating with a business*. Customers expect timely and personal interactions, conveniently within their preferred channel, that deliver richer, personalized experiences that seamlessly connect the full brand relationship.

• Nearly 90% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services
• 85% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments
• Nearly 60% of customers prefer to engage companies through digital channels
• 86% of IT leaders say that improved customer-facing technologies are critical for their organization to compete
• Businesses send more than 100 million messages per day on WhatsApp

How WhatsApp with the Customer 360 increases revenue and customer engagement and loyalty, globally

Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and Commerce Cloud applications will integrate with WhatsApp to support promotional and customer service messaging, and soon, transactional conversational commerce capabilities. Businesses will be able to transform brand and customer relationships across billions of conversations by personalizing the messaging experiences for every customer, at scale. This will enable customers to engage audiences on WhatsApp, accelerate sales, and drive better 24/7 customer support. Features include:

• Craft an end-to-end customer journey: Create, send, and manage connections with customers throughout their journey using WhatsApp and Journey Builder to create seamless customer experiences. For example, customers may receive a WhatsApp message with a reminder about an upcoming order arriving next week. As an extra incentive, the message could include a promotion with a 20% discount for a new or related product offering. The user could then confirm via a button whether to automatically add this new product to their next order.
• Personalize every moment and message with the Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform (CDP): With Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform, powered by Salesforce Genie, Salesforce customers will be able to personalize marketing-driven interactions on WhatsApp in real time using trusted first-party customer data. Whatsapp-first business messaging will leverage AI-insights from across Salesforce and other sources to personalize customer engagement with intelligent promotions, and recommendations, in each moment, at scale. Brands can also easily activate audiences directly through the Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform, powered by Genie’s real-time data, to target high-value segments or new audiences with Click-to-WhatsApp ads on Facebook and Instagram to drive customers to a one-to-one messaging experience.

• Improve selling and service conversations through AI and automation: Reduce support wait time and increase efficiency by using a combination of convenient automation and personal interactions via messaging on WhatsApp. Salesforce customers using tools like automation and AI-powered chatbots saw a 30% increase in customer satisfaction and more than 27% increase in agent productivity, customer retention, and case resolution. According to the State of Marketing Report, 60% of customers are open to using AI to improve their experiences.

• Features that enrich customer conversations: Salesforce customers will be able to use customizable message templates that include brand and product videos and images, or showcase products and services with interactive messages that allow consumers to review and purchase products in WhatsApp. Customizable buttons enable users to respond with a single tap or click, or trigger actions like opening a web link. 
• Privacy and security by default: Privacy is at the core of WhatsApp. Every WhatsApp message sent between businesses and their customers is protected by Signal encryption protocol that secures messages before they leave your device.

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.

Michael Affronti, General Manager of Messaging at Salesforce

“Serasa is transforming how we communicate with customers by using WhatsApp to elevate the customer experience through personalization and a seamless experience that incorporates secure information. And, with trust as a priority, we need a messaging service that provides privacy and security. With Salesforce enabling personalized conversations and WhatApp as the most popular messaging service in Brazil, we have an opportunity to offer a seamless, branded, and convenient engagement platform that provides convenient digital customer services for every customer“. – Patricia Camillo, CRM Manager, Serasa

“Our customers are engaging audiences in the U.S. 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,” said Michael Affronti, General Manager of Messaging at Salesforce. “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.”  

“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,” said Matt Idema, VP of Business Messaging at Meta

Availability 

• Salesforce Integration with WhatsApp Business Platform for Marketing Cloud is expected to be generally available in December 2022 with additional integrations expected to be generally available in the months to come.

*Business Messaging Usage Research by Kantar; April 2022