Overview
Spoke Phone customers can send and receive WhatsApp Messages to over 2.7 billion people. Read more about Spoke Phone's Business WhatsApp Messaging.
While WhatsApp is a great tool for your business, the complexities of Meta and their WhatsApp business account setup requires technical skills and lots of patience.
BYO Twilio Customers: If you are a BYO Twilio customer and you wish to self-implement WhatsApp for Spoke Phone, please follow this article:
Spoke Phone Direct Customers: For Spoke Phone direct customers, you will require the services of the Spoke Phone Professional Services team in order to setup WhatsApp for Business and Spoke Phone. Please reach out to your Account Manager to activate WhatsApp for Spoke Phone.
Prerequisites
- A Facebook page for your company
- A WhatsApp Business Account for your company
- At least one WhatsApp Message Template approved by Meta
- A Phone Number for use with your WhatsApp Business Account (this can be provided by either Spoke Phone or Twilio)
- The selected phone number 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 finite 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 brands, locations, teams, etc. Thankfully, Spoke Phone solves this for you.
Read more about WhatsApp for Business limitations.
- We've found it wise to think about having the least amount of WhatsApp numbers for your business as possible (ideally just one, or one for each country), and using Spoke Phone's message routing capability to route messages to teams, brands, locations, and even individuals.
Read more on Meta's website.
Message Routing Options
When a customer sends a WhatsApp Message it can be automatically sent to a single Team Inbox on Spoke Phone where one or more Spoke Phone Users can collaborate with the customer, or you can interrogate the incoming message and lookup CRMs or other systems to determine which Spoke Phone 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 Phone's routing potential provided by the Spoke Phone 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.