We’re all familiar with how the messaging platform, WhatsApp, has taken the world by storm. In fact, more than two billion people in 180+ countries use WhatsApp, being praised for its simple interface and secure (encrypted) messaging service. At the start of 2023, Salesforce partnered with WhatsApp to enable the WhatsApp Business Platform API, which proved to be one of the most popular articles we’ve posted.
The figures that were collated in the Connected Customer report cite that disconnected experiences were the respondents’ top frustration when dealing with a brand. We’ve all been there. This is why combining how marketing and service teams communicate via WhatsApp is important. Now, we’re taking a first look at Unified Conversations, which bridges Marketing Cloud and WhatsApp, with other Salesforce “clouds” that leverage WhatsApp as a communication channel.
What are “Unified Conversations”?
As the name suggests, Unified Conversations ensure that when an individual is interacting with your brand, the whole message history is accessible and maintained as the prospect/customer’s needs change – regardless of whoever is conversing from your company. This is all in aid of making conversations over WhatsApp consistent.
The marketing team may send out a mass promotion. If the contact replies, someone in a different department may pick up the conversation. As opposed to the recipient managing multiple conversation threads, unified conversations mean that all communication with your brand is collated into a single thread.
All conversations are two-way, meaning that teams who communicate one-to-one can do so effectively, alongside mass campaign messaging (without the disjointed conversation threads).
There are certainly industry-based use cases for Unified Conversations, such as Financial Services preventing fraud by offering WhatsApp as an instant messaging channel to proactively verify and provide assistance for unusual transactions.
Unified Conversations, Powered by Data Cloud
Unified Conversations are powered by Data Cloud, the platform that brings together data from multiple sources, and makes sense of it in order to build unified profiles. This then enables teams to create “cleaner” audience data. The “data from multiple sources” could include unstructured data, like conversations.
This is an interesting point to highlight. This announcement comes on the heels of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, the first iteration of Marketing Cloud built on the Salesforce platform. It appears that this is the direction that the Marketing Cloud suite could follow; in the meantime, Salesforce are committed to working on improving current features within Marketing Cloud.
Summary
Unified Conversations bridge the gap between Marketing Cloud and WhatsApp, as well as other Salesforce “clouds” that leverage WhatsApp as a communication channel – and it is now generally available!
Powered by Data Cloud, this feature helps to make conversations over WhatsApp consistent, while ensuring “cleaner” audience data is coming into your system.
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