How personalized do you get while engaging with your customer? The more channels you offer, the more likely it is the customer to engage with you and willing to know about you. This gap-filling experience is the delight for any business. With every new release, Salesforce is trying to minimize this gap between companies and their customers.

In Summer’18, Salesforce introduced Einstein Bot. This is an AI-powered chatbot natively built on the Salesforce Platform.

In Spring’20 Release Salesforce introduced its new supported feature - WhatsApp integration using Einstein Bot. The goal of this integration is to provide the service to customers through the channel differently available and popularly used. Companies are allowed to communicate with their users i.e. Customers and Clients using pre-approved notifications through WhatsApp.

Salesforce Einstein Bot, with its AI-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, connects with the customer directly to answer routine questions, bidding agents more time to help their customers with more complex issues or solve their intricate problems. This Bot is automated where it brings problematic cases directly to agents, on WhatsApp. The fascinating fact about this integration is the mobility it offers. WhatsApp is the world’s largest messaging app and hence provides the opportunity for businesses to build a robust customer database worldwide. WhatsApp using Einstein Bot, now availed in 180 countries around the world, has bounced the boundaries of Customer relationship Management (CRM).

Just like SMS or Facebook Messenger, Salesforce Einstein Bot interfaces with WhatsApp to converse with your customers all over the world. We can build WhatsApp in Lightning Experience, and Salesforce Classic in Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions with Service Cloud or Sales Cloud. Einstein Bot setup is only accessible through Lightning Experience. This feature is available for bots using Chat and Omni-Channel.

Einstein Bots are suitable for organizations with Salesforce Service Cloud implementation and Chat user licenses as well as other organizations with Digital Engagement user licenses. Digital Engagement user license is required to use WhatsApp with Salesforce Einstein Bot for a business. The organization is allowed for monthly 25 Einstein Bots conversations for each Digital Engagement or Chat user who has an active subscription. WhatsApp number is needed to be set up in Messaging to add it to any bot. Once the number is added, you can navigate to the Overview Page in the Bot Builder. Got to Channel menu, click ‘Add’ and select ‘WhatsApp’ as the Channel and Channel Name into the Deployment field.

Using WhatsApp, there are cool features like Single messages component on details pages where you can easily send a text, access chat window, and view history of each record. Einstein Bots can fetch an intelligence base from Salesforce CRM systems. The coding is not required to build these chatbots, and still, they can handle natural language interactions, and buttons, and texts which the sender can tap or click.

With WhatsApp’s approval, businesses are allowed to add 250 phone numbers of their customers. A message can contain 1600 characters (with spaces) and not more than that. This integration offers image sharing facility too. When a customer sends an image, though the file previews are not available, Sales agents can download the files. You can send images which are in .png, .jpeg, .jpg supported format. You can send files up to the size of 5 MB or less.

Along with messaging and image sharing features, WhatsApp offers a lot of other features such as sending stickers, audio files, locations, or contacts. These extra features are not provided in Einstein Bot integration with WhatsApp. There are also other minute features such as replies to specific messages that are not available in this integration.

With this new feature, Salesforce Einstein Bot and WhatsApp cater to the combined advantages. Customers get the real-time response to their problems and that of with organized manner. These are more of customer-initiated conversations. Einstein Bot analyses the conversation history, and with contact center agent traceability, measures the performance accordingly. The notifications, on the other hand, are business-initiated, pre-approved messages which are template-based. Salespeople can initiate conversations with their customers with the help of outbound notifications. You can send these notifications for the next 24 hours after the last communication with the customer if that customer has permitted such notifications.

The automated notifications, responses, and alerts make it possible to improve the SLA (Service Level Agreement) and boost the productivity level of the Sales and Marketing teams. The significant benefit this integration of WhatsApp and Einstein Bot offers to achieve customer satisfaction as they are getting what they want in their time.