Overview
Due to the complexities of Meta and WhatsApp business accounts, WhatsApp setup cannot be automated at present, and requires the Spoke Professional Services team or an approved Spoke Phone Integration Partner that has been trained in WhatsApp deployments.
Prerequisites
- A Facebook page for your company
- A WhatsApp Business Account for your company
- A Twilio Phone Number for use with your WhatsApp Business Account (Spoke/Twilio can provide this)
- The Twilio Phone configured to your WhatsApp Business Account
Considerations
WhatsApp Number Limitations and Management Overhead
WhatsApp limits the number of phone numbers you can have per account, and these limits/rules appear to often change. And, with each number comes a not insignificant amount of management and setup overhead that can be costly to maintain. For instance it's tempting to have a WhatsApp number for each location or store, but that may require you to maintain multiple Facebook Pages (one for each location), etc. Regardless, there is a finante number of phone numbers you can have on a WhatsApp Business Account, so at scale, you need some way of using one number for multiple brand, locations, teams, etc. Thankfully, Spoke solves this for you.
We've found it wise to think about having the least amount of WhatsApp numbers for your business as possible (ideall just one, or one for each country), and using Spoke's message routing capability to route messages to teams, brands, locations and even individuals.
Read more about WhatsApp Business Account phone number limitations.
Message Routing Options
When a customer sends a WhatsApp Message it can be automatically sent to a single Team Inbox on Spoke where one or more Spoke Users can collaborate with the customer, or you can interrogate the incoming message and lookup CRMs or other systems to determine which Spoke user/s the message should be routed to.
Here are some common message routing flows:
As you can see, WhatsApp (and SMS) routing can be simple and fixed, or complex and dynamic based on who the customer is, what number they messaged on WhatsApp, what time of day it is, what content was in the message body, etc. It's up to you, and Spoke Phone Professional Services team can help you figure out the best options for your specific business use case.
Example: Multi-location personalized WhatsApp using one WhatsApp number
A very common question we get asked is how to have one WhatsApp number used for multiple stores or locations so that customers get a localized and personal experience. Using Spoke's routing potential provided by the Spoke Inbound Conversation Data Action combined with a CRM and other routing logic, it's possible to personalize the autoresponders, content, images, and even button options presented in WhatsApp reply messages sent back to customers that WhatsApp your business.
Getting started
Contact your Spoke Phone Account Manager or authorized Spoke Phone System Integration partner to get setup on WhatsApp.
