In a time where social media has become an indispensable part of our lives, social media platforms are finding ways to expand their utility beyond social networking. Social networking giant Facebook was one of the first social networking platforms and still has the largest userbase of 2.6 billion monthly active users. Facebook was initially created to allow people to find friends, family, and people they may be interested in and network with them virtually but soon became popular as a platform to grow business.
WhatsApp is an instant messaging platform that has gained huge popularity and has over 1.5 bn users worldwide. WhatsApp provides users a personal space where they can have close conversations with their friends, family, and acquaintances. It also allows users to exchange images, videos, files, contact details, live locations, or even connect over a voice or video call with people anywhere in the world absolutely free. WhatsApp has the highest message open rate of 98% as compared to any other social platform. This has attracted businesses to use WhatsApp as the channel to communicate with their customers and engage with them on a personal level.
Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 and has now integrated both the platforms and made it easier for businesses to handle CRM through its platforms.
How WhatsApp works with Facebook to empower business after the two giants’ integration
Facebook has integrated most of its features with WhatsApp and now allows using them interchangeably without having to login into the other application. Here are 5 features that have changed with this integration:
1 . Now WhatsApp allows you to check out any business’s Facebook shop and WhatsApp Business profile from your personal WhatsApp Account.
2. Making payments have become easier as you can choose Facebook Pay to make the payment on WhatsApp and saves you the hassle of re-entering the payment details.
3. Now businesses can share a WhatsApp link with their Facebook and Instagram advertisements. By clicking on the link, customers can directly connect with the business through WhatsApp chat.
4. In case you forget your credentials to your Facebook account, you can still log in to your account by sending a verification code to your WhatsApp number.
5. If you are using Facebook’s Portal as your video calling device, you can easily connect WhatsApp with it and sync your contacts saving you the effort of feeding them separately.
6 Recent Facebook Feature Updates on Messenger That Can Help our Business
If you looking for ways to improve your CRM through Facebook, here are 6 feature updates that you should be aware of:
a. Assign Conversation
On a daily basis, a business may receive different types of customer queries. Facebook’s latest feature update allows the Facebook page admin to assign a particular conversation to an executive who is best suited to handle such queries. By distributing conversations and assigning to different page roles, businesses can ensure that each customer query is handled efficiently.
b. Automated responses
The automated response feature can be a true lifesaver for Facebook page admins who have to handle thousands of incoming messages and queries on a daily basis. The automated response feature gives you plenty of response options such as instant reply, away messages, frequently asked questions, and job applications received. It also has a unique feature through which you can track every time a customer publicly shares a ‘page recommended’ or a ‘page not recommended’ message and allows you to send a follow-up message to know about their experience. This feature can help you in boosting your customer’s experience many folds.
c. Manage label for sales funnel
For a group of people managing a large contact list and identifying each contact uniquely may seem difficult. By assigning unique labels to each contact, you can easily categorize your priority list in your contacts and even assign contacts to your designated executives. Facebook allows you to assign unique labels from suggested lists or create your custom label for each contact and make your sales funnel easily manageable.
d. User Profile Synchronization
With Facebook’s latest feature, you can synchronize your Instagram account with Facebook. This allows you to access your Instagram messages on Facebook and vice versa. In Facebook’s attempt to interconnect all its applications, this feature update can definitely be useful for businesses trying to manage CRM on various social platforms.
e. Buyer Persona Design
Buyer personas are critical to understanding customer behavior, their interests, and preferences. With these basic details, businesses can have a clear picture of their buyer’s key interest areas and focus on their personalized customer experience. Facebook has made it easy for businesses to create and view buyer persona for each contact. It automatically fills in a lot of basic details such as name, email id, etc. and allows admins to customize the details as per requirement.
f. Monitor user activities on your page/posts
For accounts with multiple access, it becomes impossible to keep track of the activities of each contact. With the ‘Activity’ feature, Facebook page managers can track activities such as appointments booked, order placed, payment received and order shipped. This can take off huge for page managers and ensure transparency and smooth rolling of the sales funnel.
Why SocialEpoch is still a favourite among its users
SocialEpoch is a WhatsApp based SCRM tool and possesses the same key features available on Facebook such as automated response, managing labels, buyer persona design, assigning conversations, and monitoring user activities. Yet there are several factors that which makes SocialEpoch a more preferred SCRM solution for enterprises. Here are key feature of SocialEpoch:
1. 10 Simultaneous account
SocialEpoch is a platform that allows users to create and use 10 WhatsApp accounts simultaneously. With this feature, large enterprises can use separate accounts for its various business functionalities. As for social influencers, they can use separate accounts for personal contacts, fans, co-influencers, clients, brands etc. This feature helps in maintaining an organized space for your social engagements.
2. Smart chat-bot
Chat-bots are an essential for every CRM. Businesses relay heavily in chatbots to improve customer enagement and provide preliminary customer care services. Using Socialepoch’s smart chat-bot you can give your customers supreme customer care and gain maximum retention and lifetime customer loyalty. You can use the smart chatbot to set the auto-reply from the admin console by using one or several keywords. Go to Auto-reply Settings, input your keywords relevant to the answer, choose the match type, input your auto-reply message content.
3. Visualized Data Board
Big enterprises receive lots of customer data on a daily basis. This data helps in user analytics, product, and marketing strategy planning. SocialEpoch helps in managing all the data and present in the form of visual data boards which makes it a lot easier for the management to monitor and analyze.
4. Keyword Detect and Alarm
SocialEpoch has a unique keyword detection feature that identifies predefined keywords every time you receive a message from your customers. If the message requires immediate attention, it will raise an alarm and you can attend to the message immediately.
5. Multilingual Translator
Businesses need to interact with national as well as international clients and customers. You can overcome the language barrier in such cases using SocialEpoch’s multilingual translator feature. This feature allows you to select the target language for your communication and gives you the choice of selecting the native language for your clients.
6. Data Encryption
With SocialEpoch, you can always be sure that all your confidential data is safe always. SocialEpoch is based on WhatsApp data encryption and data masking techniques which ensures that your data never gets in the handls of wrong people. The masking and encryption security allow only the sender and the receiver to view the message. Other than that, no third party can view or track any of the data exchanged on the platform.
The integration of the world’s most popular socializing app with the world’s most used chat app in the digital marketing era can be a path-breaking move and can completely revolutionize the digital marketing trends. While it provides businesses the ease to manage multiple social media platforms interchangeably, customers can now expect more efficiency in customer services and user experience.
