Boosting Digital Engagement with Salesforce through WhatsApp, Live Chat, SMS and Facebook
Maintaining several channels to engage with customers has become a regular occurrence with businesses. However, keeping up with market trends and customer’s expectations is what tips the scales in your favour. There are many benefits of boosting digital engagement for a company, but it comes down to developing stronger relationships with your customers to increase customer retention.
On the other hand, when customers interact with a digitally-savvy business, they experience benefits such as:
Choosing the most convenient channel to interact with the company
Having an option to self-serve through website chat
Getting important information through SMS notifications
Have access to faster alternatives to voice calls with SMS, messaging, and chat
To get a better idea of how to improve your digital engagement strategy, read on.
Messaging channels to consider adding to your digital engagement strategy
In the Spring 2020 release, Salesforce introduced integration to one of the most used social messaging application – WhatsApp. As of July 2020, two billion users were accessing the WhatsApp messenger monthly, and fortunately, Salesforce has provided a way to integrate the app with the CRM, so that customers could use it to communicate with businesses.
Through Salesforce and WhatsApp integration, the engagement can flow both ways, including:
Customer-initiated conversations for specific customer care interactions
Business-initiated notifications which are relevant pre-approved messages
According to Salesforce, this change applies to Lightning Experience for the Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions. To have WhatsApp set up in your Salesforce instance, you can follow Salesforce’s guidance here.
Live Chat
Having a quick and easy engagement channel right on the company website is a win-win for both the business and customers. Live chat can provide answers in real-time, to engage with customers browsing the web or provide answers as part of the customer care package. With Salesforce you can set chat on company websites for both desktop and mobile browsers.
By leveraging live chat, your customer service reps can quickly respond on the platform, or to scale even further, you can use Einstein AI bots capabilities to routine customer questions or redirect to the right agent.
SMS
SMS messages have an impressive opening rate of 98%, which makes it an excellent opportunity for businesses to apply it to good use. Similarly to WhatsApp, SMS messaging gives customers an option to communicate with customer service reps using text messaging. On the other hand, businesses can use SMS messaging for service, sales and marketing purposes.
For example, companies can leverage SMS messaging to:
Collect additional account details
Follow up on leads after a sales call
Send occasional messages, such as for customer’s birthday
Bulk message users for promotional and sales purposes
Find more about how to set up SMS messaging in Salesforce here.
Facebook Messenger
Another useful channel to interact with your customers is Facebook Messenger. Customers use Facebook Messenger to send messages to your company’s Facebook page, and customer service reps can accept the message and reply from the Salesforce Service Cloud.
Customer care agents can also reach out to customers on these channels to keep them updated or use automation to send customers messages when Salesforce records change.
As Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular social networks and messengers worldwide, it’s worth the consideration of adding it to your digital engagement channels. You can use the guided setup flow to set up a Facebook Messenger channel.
Final Thoughts
Have you tried engaging with your customers through the channels listed above? In case you need support with improving your digital engagement methods, feel free to reach out to our team of experts at Cloud Orca.
