Drive more sales, engagement and better support: Introducing WhatsApp Business Calling from Twilio

Drive more sales, engagement and better support: Introducing WhatsApp Business Calling from Twilio

In today’s competitive market, successful businesses understand the importance of staying connected with their customers through quality engagement. Communicating through voice interactions is the preferred option for consumers for a trusted, flexible, and personalized experience, 87% of consumers worldwide prefer brands that connect their interactions across voice and messaging.

When used appropriately, voice interactions can be among the most effective from an ROI perspective for businesses. This involves customers reaching out to businesses for relevant and critical scenarios, enabling self-service automated call flows to direct users to the right agent, and empowering contact center agents to engage in effective human collaboration with their customers.

Voice interactions provide value to businesses as well. Integrating VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology offers high-quality, flexible, and cost-effective voice communication, ensuring that businesses can maintain clear and reliable conversations with their customers from anywhere. If applied correctly, this approach will boost sales, increase engagement, and provide overall better customer support.

Introducing WhatsApp Business Calling API (Private Beta)

Twilio has partnered with Meta to be among the first providers to offer WhatsApp Business Calling API in Private Beta. With WhatsApp Business Calling, businesses can add Voice-over-IP (VoIP) calling to communications between customers and business on the WhatsApp consumer application. Customers can use the WhatsApp consumer app in a manner similar to the current Consumer to Consumer Calling product, and Businesses can use the Twilio Programmable Voice APIs to empower data-driven, contextual communication with those customers.

Who can use it

Existing Twilio Programmable Voice customer that complies with the following conditions can request to participate in the beta:

• Country location (Brazil, Mexico, India or Indonesia)

• Have an existing WhatsApp messaging use case with at least 1 sender (Product to assist in confirming this)

• Be using an Inbound calling use-case: 

  • Service: Customer service escalations that require live, empathetic voice interaction, i.e., ordering, support and troubleshooting, customer care resolution

  • Marketing: Complex sales and marketing calls, such as for real estate or automotive (consumer-initiated, can be scheduled by the business)

  • Utility: Utility calls for last mile communication (i.e., customer calling delivery driver)

• All calls must be VoIp-terminated. No PSTN terminations allowed for the Beta.

How WhatsApp Business Calling API helps businesses

WhatsApp Business Voice Calling allows users to communicate with the business agent by tapping on a “call” button or the business can send a message template containing the “call” option button within WhatsApp. That inbound call will then be routed to the business’ Twilio application, where the business will have access to the full array of Twilio Programmable Voice features, like Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Voice Intelligence, voice recording and speech recognition. Customers like Chime have seen a 12% increase in customer satisfaction by evolving to a highly personalized IVR solution built on voice or FlixBus that were able to automate 90% of their call flows preserving valuable agent bandwidth.

Businesses that already use Twilio Programmable Voice and/or Twilio Flex will be able to directly integrate WhatsApp voice calls into their existing solutions, since they will be using the same tools they already know and love. These options empower businesses to provide enhanced user experiences by keeping users on the WhatsApp consumer app, providing real-time personalized experiences and support, better outreach capabilities and analytics.

WhatsApp Business Calling API is the new addition to help businesses increase meaningful interactions with their customers and increase revenue while providing outstanding customer support. Learn more about our beta here.