Farmacia La Buena is a pharmaceutical and essential healthcare goods provider with 80 outlets in El Salvador. In the beginning, it was a strictly brick-and-mortar business, but the COVID-19 pandemic caused Farmacia La Buena to find new ways to engage with customers, who relied on the company for their medical needs. Thus, it started using WhatsApp for customer communication.

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The Problem

At first, the company’s sales and support agents used the WhatsApp Business App to chat with customers. Because they all shared a single WhatsApp Business account, it was very limiting — only 5 of its 10 agents could use the app simultaneously.

What’s worse, customer conversations were often abandoned or neglected due to a lack of supervision. This negatively affected response times and consequently, customer satisfaction. Farmacia La Buena realized that it needed a more sophisticated multiagent solution for its customer-facing agents to work with efficiency.

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The respond.io Solution

Farmacia La Buena signed up for a respond.io Business plan but quickly upgraded to an Enterprise plan to enjoy additional features and a dedicated customer success manager. The following solutions were implemented.

Multiuser Access for WhatsApp Was Enabled

First of all, Farmacia La Buena upgraded its WhatsApp account to WhatsApp API and connected it to respond.io to allow all of its agents to operate under a single number.

Now the company agents are not restricted by WhatsApp Business App’s multiuser limitations and can log in simultaneously into respond.io’s shared inbox. With more agents online, more customers can be attended to at a time and response times immediately decreased.

New Conversation Entry Points Were Facilitated with an Omnichannel Widget

Encouraged by the possibilities of respond.io’s omnichannel inbox, Farmacia La Buena decided to start using several popular messaging channels to reach as many customers as possible.

As most customers get to know Farmacia La Buena through its website, the company decided to add an omnichannel widget with the following channels: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM, Telegram and website chat.

Now customers choose between a range of channel options to start a conversation with the company. For example, those who want to chat over their desktop may not be familiar with WhatsApp Web and could choose website chat or Facebook Messenger instead.

Repetitive Processes were Streamlined with Advanced Automation

Farmacia La Buena now has 25 customer-facing agents utilizing the respond.io platform. To reduce first response times, it used respond.io’s Workflows automation to automate processes and reduce agent load.

First, to create a great first impression effortlessly, the company uses a welcome message Workflow template to automatically greet customers who initiate a conversation. Then, customer conversations need to be directed to the proper team.

When done manually, chat routing is a repetitive, time-consuming process. For efficiency, Farmacia La Buena also built a chat routing Workflow that routes conversations to the sales or support team depending on their needs and assigns them to an available agent.

Promotions are Sent to Segmented Audiences via WhatsApp

One of the disadvantages of mass messaging with the WhatsApp Business App is a broadcast limit of 256 unique contacts per broadcast list. For a business with thousands of customers across El Salvador, this was a major constraint.

WhatsApp API brought new marketing opportunities to Farmacia La Buena. Now, it broadcasts WhatsApp promotions to segmented audiences. Segments allow businesses to group customers based on specific criteria such as location, language, or behavior.

Once segments are created, businesses can use them to send targeted broadcasts to customers who are most likely to be interested in the message.

Agent Supervision Became Possible with a Shared Inbox

With respond.io’s shared inbox, supervisors now have an eagle eye over the conversations. This allows them to find areas for improvement in the way agents handle customers and ensure agents follow up on all conversations.

They can also identify complicated cases and step in when needed. Plus, Farmacia La Buena’s current respond.io plan can be scaled to give access to more agents as business needs grow.

“Respond.io is an innovative company that has boosted our interactions with clients in a way that wouldn’t be possible with other platforms. Now we can broadcast WhatsApp messages at scale, which was impossible before. The vulnerabilities we had in the past are long gone: No more lost conversations and no more agent restrictions.” – Elias Rosa, Business Intelligence Analyst for Farmacia La Buena

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The Results

After upgrading to WhatsApp API, the company no longer faces issues derived from multiuser limitations on WhatsApp. With a respond.io Enterprise plan, Farmacia La Buena can rest assured that more agents can be added to the platform as needed for scalability.

While increasing its broadcast limits was not the company’s main concern, it soon experienced the effectiveness of broadcasts via the WhatsApp API. Now WhatsApp has become one of its main marketing and remarketing channels with nearly 8,000 targeted WhatsApp promotional messages sent per month.

Lastly, respond.io was instrumental in helping Farmacia La Buena enhance its customer experience. By automating its routing strategy with Workflows, the company was able to reduce first response times and resolution times by 50%.