Blog: Still using WhatsApp for Business in a separate window? This is what you’re missing out on.

WhatsApp: convenient contact worldwide

Customers increasingly demand the convenience of omnichannel contact, with the ability to use whichever channel is the most convenient at the time. One channel has excelled in this: WhatsApp. This popular communications channel has become a valued way for customers to get in touch for answers or to resolve problems. It’s convenient, discreet, and doesn’t require waiting around. Any company looking to extend its presence in developing markets such as Latin America or India (where social messaging is #1), will need to support this channel as a central part of their contact strategy.

Typical WhatsApp for Business setups

Despite the growing popularity, it’s still common for WhatsApp to be handled in a separate way to other channels. This often requires a designated person/people to support WhatsApp using the WhatsApp for Business desktop app, or sometimes with a dedicated smartphone. Box ticked? Not really. This setup means that WhatsApp communications are siloed, limited, and inefficient. This prevents your organization from really wielding the full potential of WhatsApp as a channel for customer engagement and optimized customer service. Another (better) approach is to integrate WhatsApp as a core part of an omnichannel Teams Contact Center. This allows for a seamless experience and unlocks new business value to.

What you miss out on when WhatsApp isn’t integrated into your business with Teams

#1 Low-stress user experience

It’s easy to underestimate the stress and inconvenience of needing to constantly switch between screens or apps just to find the right information, or add information to resources like CRMs.

This can detract from the customer experience too, as it may not be immediately apparent who they are and what their history with your organization is.  Each time a customer service agent has to ask unnecessary questions, go hunting for their order history or open a support ticket, this causes a small ‘bump’ in an otherwise smooth experience.And there’s an increased risk that your ‘slightly stressed’ agents will make inadvertent errors when copying or retyping data from one location to another.

#2 Gaining better customer knowledge

When WhatsApp is a disconnected ‘island’, it’s far harder to capture meaningful data from each customer experience. Each WhatsApp conversation becomes an anonymous chat, leaving you in the dark about the bigger picture. This means that you’re missing out on opportunities to identify customer needs and to improve your offer to match. You can’t easily update your CRM when WhatsApp isn’t truly integrated with it. It’s hard to identify customers, and fiddly to switch between apps to add this data. In reality, this means it never happens and all that precious knowledge of the customer is lost.

By contrast, when you use ROGER365.io to integrate WhatsApp for Business into Teams, you can use a single screen for all channels, as well as your preferred CRM and other resources. This setup allows you to automatically summarize each conversation and save it to the CRM. You can also use sentiment analysis to derive important insights gathered from all your WhatsApp conversations, or from specific customers. This creates a source of intelligence from previously ‘disconnected’ WhatsApp interactions.

#3 Leveraging data with outbound communication

When you’re limited to WhatsApp’s native capabilities, it’s much harder to leverage your data and other enterprise content to generate business value. While it is possible to conduct an outreach campaign with WhatsApp for Business, it is hard to use your CRM data in a meaningful way, with a solid strategy that targets certain customers in an intelligent way. If you can link your CRM data to outbound campaigns, you can begin to really leverage the power of this popular channel. Imagine what you could achieve by starting well-targeted one-on-one conversations with selected customers: upselling opportunities, follow-up/aftercare, troubleshooting tips, recalls/safety warnings, unique offers, and many more possibilities besides these.

#4 Enhanced productivity and efficiency

Using WhatsApp in a separate window costs you a lot more than just a few clicks each time you need to find information or open a support ticket. Although those also add up: it might be just a few extra seconds per conversation, but this built-in inefficiency certainly stacks up over the course of each day, month, and year. But there’s a much bigger opportunity being missed. When WhatsApp is integrated into a ROGER365.io Teams Contact Center you can start using the same time-saving tools with your WhatsApp communications too.

For example, you can serve more queries automatically with a simple Q&A chatbot. More complex customer queries can also be dealt with by using a customized AI chatbot powered by Microsoft Copilot, and your agents can use Copilot as an intelligent assistant to resolve queries more quickly and effectively. And you gain ‘structural efficiencies’ by integrating WhatsApp too. As an integrated channel in your contact center, agents will automatically be given available actions and shown all the right information from your CRM as soon as they pick up the chat. Because everything they need is right there in the Teams client, time is saved on each interaction.

As part of your omnichannel contact center, more agents can service WhatsApp queries - which automatically appear in the hybrid queue along with all the other channels you choose to support. This gives you better transparency over these conversations too, reducing your risk. You’ll gain additional efficiencies by using ROGER365.io’s capabilities for building automations and streamlined workflows, which can be used for all the channels in your contact center – including WhatsApp.

#5 Gaining advanced capabilities and tooling

Without being integrated into an omnichannel Teams Contact Center, you’re stuck with the native capabilities of WhatsApp for Business. Without using a secure and compliant solution like ROGER365.io to integrate WhatsApp with Teams, it’s hard to connect this channel to business software and associated processes. And it’s even harder to maintain compliance throughout.

However, by using ROGER365.io as a secure bridge, you can connect WhatsApp communications with numerous advanced tools, including the wealth of possibilities that come from the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. We have already touched upon the benefits of using Microsoft Copilot in your contact center to save time and improve customer satisfaction. Now let’s look at what else is possible.

Rapid data retrieval

For example, with data and content held in Microsoft 365, you can use VivaTopics to label and organize your data, and make it easier to surface the right documents or other information based on the context.

Intelligent AI assistant

You can also use Microsoft Copilot as an assistant; to build automations for you for example, turning WhatsApp (and other channels) into a more dynamic customer engagement tool using more complex automated responses.

24/7 global multilingual support

Using the multilingual capabilities of an always-on Copilot AI chatbot, your WhatsApp channel can become a 24/7 global support hub. This can potentially resolve the majority of queries without any human intervention.

But how will your customers react to this? Or anything else?

Advanced analytics

By using ROGER365.io’s powerful reporting capabilities, you can analyze customer sentiment from WhatsApp, and compare this against sentiment on other channels. You can identify common issues, and uncover new ways to improve customer experiences and reduce costs.

These insights can also help you to optimize WhatsApp, and make it a core part of your contact strategy, instead of an ad hoc afterthought.

Total customization

Thanks to the incredible customizability of a ROGER365.io Teams Contact Center you’re free to tailor your processes to work the way you want. You can integrate your preferred tools and resources, and create a truly unique brand experience that wins customers’ hearts – your way.

The benefits of using ROGER365.io to integrate WhatsApp into Teams

WhatsApp has a lot of potential, especially for businesses looking to increase customer satisfaction or expand their reach into growing markets. But you cannot achieve this potential by leaving it disconnected from the rest of your contact center. It must become part of a holistic strategy, and equipped with modern tooling.

This way, you can start leveraging technology like AI and automation, and have instant access to all the right data and actions. Less time is wasted, customer service agents are empowered to work more productively, and customers get better solutions, faster. Many organizations have discovered the benefits of a ROGER365.io Teams Contact Center.  It enables you to support customers to the highest level across multiple channels, including WhatsApp - and all within the secure, stable, and compliant Teams framework.

Want to see how it works for yourself? Book a demo, or start your free 14-day trial today.