Respond.io WhatsApp Inbox: How to Use it for Messaging at Scale [Oct 2024]

Are you looking for a WhatsApp inbox for business messaging? If so, this blog post is for you! First, we'll discuss the benefits of a WhatsApp inbox for your business. Then, we’ll take a close look at the respond.io WhatsApp inbox features and how to sign up for respond.io WhatsApp API. Lastly, we’ll explore how respond.io can enhance your overall customer communication experience.

Why You Need the respond.io WhatsApp Inbox

Using the WhatsApp Business App, you may have faced problems like siloed conversations from agents using personal numbers to chat with customers. Managing conversations also becomes difficult when multiple agents share a single WhatsApp Business App account.

As your business grows, these challenges will become even more significant as they directly impact your business’ sales, customer satisfaction and overall revenue.

To use WhatsApp for business messaging at scale, WhatsApp offers the WhatsApp API. However, it does not have a user interface for sending and receiving messages. That’s why you need a messaging inbox like respond.io.

With respond.io, you can sign up for a WhatsApp API account easily and fully manage your WhatsApp Business Account (WABA). Before showing you how to achieve this and more, let's look at how you can use respond.io as a WhatsApp inbox.

Centralize Messages From All Messaging Channels in One Omnichannel Inbox

Medium to large businesses usually manage multiple WhatsApp accounts for different branches or outlets. They also have to maintain a presence on popular messaging channels like Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Instagram.

While handling messages from multiple channels is challenging, you can connect all the channels your customers use in one omnichannel inbox. This allows you to manage all your conversations in one centralized location, eliminating the need to juggle multiple channels or platforms to engage with customers.

By centralizing all channels, you can consolidate customers’ data from these channels in one place, making it easier to provide a true omnichannel experience. Let's explore a valuable tool that further facilitates this process by ensuring unified customer profiles.

Break Down Silos and Understand Customer Context with Contact Merge

Having a presence on multiple channels increases the likelihood of the same customer contacting you through different channels. This can lead to situations like customers having to reidentify themselves and repeat their issues when communicating with agents.

With respond.io, businesses can merge conversations from different channels in a single thread for a unified customer profile. For example, if a customer has previously contacted you on Instagram but decided to message you on WhatsApp next, you can merge the conversations to get context easily.

Merge conversations from different channels for a comprehensive Contact view

With this feature, you can identify returning customers, spot recurring issues and make informed decisions when assisting customers. Now that you know how to provide an omnichannel experience, let's look at how to manage high volumes of messages effectively.

Enhance Conversation Traceability with Auto Assignment

Unlike the WhatsApp Business App where agents can manually pick conversations without supervision, managers can ensure fair conversation distribution among agents with respond.io’s Workflow builder.

They can build automation based on their assignment logic like distributing conversations equally among agents and assigning conversations to agents with the least conversations open.

With automation handling all agent assignments, managers can easily monitor and identify the agents accountable for each interaction.

Managers can ensure fair conversation distribution among agents with respond.io’s Workflow automation. They can build automation based on their assignment logic like round-robin, assign to agents with the least conversations open or assign high-value customers to dedicated agents. This way, agents will receive a fair share of conversations assigned to them and managers can track the agents responsible for each conversation. To monitor conversations with high-value customers, businesses can create Custom Inboxes that include their conversations. This allows managers to closely track and supervise these conversations, ensuring that customers receive the best possible assistance. — Communicating with customers in the respond.io inbox

To prioritize high-value customers, businesses can automatically assign them to dedicated agents. If you want to monitor their interactions, you can create Custom Inboxes to set these conversations apart from regular conversations.

This allows managers to closely track and supervise conversations with high-value customers and ensure that they receive the best possible assistance. Now that you know how respond.io facilitates WhatsApp messaging, let’s look at how to connect WhatsApp with respond.io.

How to Connect WhatsApp with respond.io WhatsApp Inbox

Respond.io is a WhatsApp Business Solution Provider and a customer conversation management software. This means that you can sign up for the respond.io WhatsApp API and start messaging customers quickly.

To start, you need to sign up for respond.io and prepare a phone number that is not connected to any WhatsApp account. Once ready, click on this link and follow the steps to set up respond.io WhatsApp API integration.

This is a quick sign-up process. In only a few minutes you can start enjoying the full range of respond.io's features. That said, let’s take a closer look at its features in the next section.

Respond.io WhatsApp Inbox: Quick Wins

Respond.io has brought significant benefits to businesses across the globe by helping them gain more qualified leads, improve sales conversions and achieve a high degree of customer satisfaction. Here’s how you can achieve the same success with respond.io.

Fully Manage WhatsApp Business Account with respond.io

With respond.io, you can fully manage your WhatsApp Business Account (WABA) easily. This includes managing your WABA balance in respond.io’s WhatsApp Fees Module and creating and submitting message templates for approval.

Manage WhatsApp fees on the respond.io WhatsApp Fees Module

You can also view your phone number quality rating and manage your WhatsApp Business Profile in the Settings Module. If you have a WhatsApp Business Account and want to benefit from the capabilities mentioned, you can seamlessly migrate it to respond.io without experiencing any downtime.

Next, let’s look at how you can use message templates to send WhatsApp notifications.

Send Notifications with WhatsApp Broadcast

WhatsApp notifications have a high likelihood of being read since they trigger push notifications that are difficult to ignore. With respond.io, you can schedule and send broadcast notifications like promotional messages, important customer updates and more to segmented audiences.

You can even get insights into your broadcast campaign with broadcast analytics and use the data you’ve gathered to plan future broadcasts.

Note that WhatsApp requires businesses to obtain opt-in from customers before sending notifications. Spamming customers with unwanted messages can lead to them blocking you, impacting your phone number quality rating and overall customer experience.

Next, let's dive into how you can set up automation to streamline business processes.

Automate Any Processes with Advanced Automation

Incorporating automation into business processes can be highly beneficial, especially when you need to manage high volumes of messages. With respond.io, you can leverage advanced Workflow automation to streamline any business processes.

Whether you're creating Workflows from scratch or using templates, respond.io's visual automation builder allows you to automate conversations and tasks with any level of complexity.

For instance, you can design specific automation journeys for customers depending on their messages or responses in pre-chat surveys. Then automatically route and assign them to the right team and agent quickly.

This frees up agents' time from having to ask customers the same questions manually to get context. Another way to ease agents’ workload is to automate complicated tasks and enable agents to execute them easily. Let's take a closer look at it in the next section.

Automate and Execute Complicated Manual Tasks

Managers can automate complicated tasks like customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, shift transfers and case escalation. Then enable agents to launch them at a click with the Shortcut Trigger button while chatting with customers.

This feature eliminates the need for agents to manually perform complex tasks, minimizes human errors and eliminates the hassle of switching between multiple platforms. As a result, they can focus their effort on chatting with customers and delivering high-quality assistance.

For example, if a case is too complicated for a Level 1 support agent, the agent can escalate the case to a Level 2 support agent easily. They can click the Shortcut Trigger button, fill in a short form for context and let the automation escalate the case.

Agents can also use this feature to escalate cases to external platforms like Slack and exchange information between CRMs and respond.io to retrieve updated contact profiles or create deals and tickets.

In addition to integrating your internal communication platform and CRMs for task automation, respond.io enables you to automate processes by integrating your existing software stack.

Integrate respond.io with External Platforms

Businesses can integrate any type of software with respond.io such as data enrichment platforms like Clearbit and a range of applications that supports Zapier and Make.com integrations.

You can also use Webhooks to trigger messages based on customer actions on external platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and more. This includes abandoned cart messages, shipping updates, order confirmations, product recommendations and other relevant notifications.

Businesses can integrate any type of software with respond.io like data enrichment platforms like Clearbit and a range of applications that supports Zapier and Make.com integrations. You can also use Webhooks to trigger messages based on customer actions on external platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and more. This includes abandoned cart messages, shipping updates, order confirmations, product recommendations and other relevant notifications. With respond.io’s flexible integration capability, businesses can seamlessly share data between respond.io and other platforms, ensuring smooth information flow, streamlined operations and cohesive customer experiences. — Respond.io WhatsApp API: Integrate your current software stack with respond.io

With respond.io’s flexible integration capability, businesses can seamlessly share data between respond.io and other platforms, ensuring smooth information flow, streamlined operations and cohesive customer experiences.

Next, we’ll look at the most important feature to measure outcomes and performance: Reports and Analytics.

Gain Access to Advanced Reports and Analytics

Respond.io’s advanced Reports Module allows supervisors to easily track agent productivity, monitor conversation progress and measure resolution times among many others.

By leveraging the Reports Module, supervisors can identify any gaps or inefficiencies in their processes. Then, they can use their findings to drive continuous improvement in team performance and optimize business operations.

And that’s all you need to know about using respond.io. Want to start using respond.io as a WhatsApp inbox? Sign up for the respond.io WhatsApp API account and start messaging customers in minutes.

How to Use the respond.io WhatsApp Inbox for Messaging at Scale [October 2024]