WhatsApp CRM

Before explaining how to use WhatsApp as a CRM let’s understand what it is a CMR.

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a strategy for managing all relationships and interactions of a company that take place with potential and existing customers. A CRM system helps companies stay in touch with customers, streamline processes and improve profitability.

The goal of a CRM system is simple: to improve all the interactions underlying the business. CRM solutions help you deliver an excellent customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle, at every marketing, sales, e-commerce, and customer service interaction.

Now that you understand what a CRM is you can easily understand that using WhatsApp as a CRM you can manage all the relationships and interactions of your company through WhatsApp.

But why you should use WhatsApp and not another CRM?

You can better manage communications with your target audience, which is why WhatsApp can help make sending and receiving instant messages faster and more efficient.

Equally important is knowing how to better organize conversations, to be responsive in replies and make interaction with users more satisfying. For this it is necessary to create an effective structure for chat management.

WhatsApp CRM is the management of, at least part of, the relationship with the customer through WhatsApp, either integrating what happens on WhatsApp in a CRM system or managing WhatsApp as if it were a CRM. As you can see, there are two parts here. Let’s see them

WhatsApp and CRM or CRM and WhatsApp

WhatsApp is an application that has revolutionized the way many people communicate. It is perhaps the most transversal application there is, the one used by your grandfather, your mother, and your brother-in-law. It seems trivial, but what years of introductory technology courses did not achieve, WhatsApp did: that people of all generations use an application to communicate.

An application that was born from the consumer side: at the beginning, WhatsApp was not very “friendly” with advertising (we still do not have advertising within the application) and even with companies: WhatsApp Business was not launched until 2018.

With this scenario, large companies have not been able to make a move until a few years ago, with the opening of the API.

Let’s remember that there are two main solutions for companies, WhatsApp Business, the application for small businesses, and the API, where we can create direct developments or work with established providers (to date, only 59 providers have direct access to the API by WhatsApp).

But in WhatsApp CRM businesses from all over the word saw the opportunity of having more customer in a very easy way. Businesses of all kinds began to offer WhatsApp orders, book appointments and answer questions long before WhatsApp Business arrived. Something that, as the contacts and conversations grew, could be unmanageable.

We have two main scenarios:

• Companies that already have CRM and different established systems and want to add WhatsApp as another channel. That is, integrate WhatsApp into your CRM.

• Companies that started using WhatsApp as their main channel or an important one. What they need is to professionalize the management of the channel, assign conversations to different people (WhatsApp Multiagent), program automatic response flows, mark different states in the conversations.

How to integrate WhatsApp with your CRM

If you are in the first scenario, two things can happen:

The CRM you use has some integration already done

The “good and easy” case, where you just have to “connect them”. Some examples: Zoho or SugarCRM have extensions ready. At this point you just need to have your account registered in WhatsApp Business API.

The CRM you use does NOT have a ready integration with WhatsApp

In this case, it will be necessary to do a custom development or change the CRM (the first option should be easier).

WhatsApp Zoho Developers Group