With over 1 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp is an integral part of our lives. And with such a huge adoption, ecommerce businesses are quickly coming onboard WhatsApp for their customers!
But it’s difficult to handle customers using just the WhatsApp Business app or with WhatsApp web. Let alone do that when you want your support team to handle the queries.
That’s where a WhatsApp Inbox comes in handy!
See all your customer messages on one dashboard and manage customers without losing track!
Let’s take a deeper dive into how things work, and how you can set up a shared WhatsApp inbox for your ecommerce business.
What is a WhatsApp Inbox?
Think of an email inbox, but instead of managing emails you manage WhatsApp conversations.
As ecommerce store owners, you have lots of requests coming in from different channels including WhatsApp and you may unknowingly miss out on a few. This is where the need for a WhatsApp inbox comes into play.
With DelightChat, you can view messages from all different channels in a single place! That includes WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook (comments and DMs), Emails as well as live chat.
You can even manage multiple stores from the same dashboard and let your entire support team handle customer queries independently.
To use a WhatsApp Inbox software, you need access to WhatsApp API, which you can get through DelightChat.
When do you really need to add a WhatsApp Team Inbox?
Now that’s a question you need to ask yourself first. Is your store at a stage where incorporating a new tool makes sense?
For example, if you are able to easily handle customer queries without help, an inbox for WhatsApp may not be necessary. But if you are already overwhelmed with the number of requests and maybe even have a team member or two who are helping you out, you should definitely consider adding this to your company toolkit.
Generally these few questions will help you out:
- Are you answering more than 30 messages a day?
- Do you need to delegate your customer support to a team?
- Are you also answering messages and mentions from multiple different social media platforms?
If you answered yes to the above questions, you should begin looking for a good WhatsApp inbox tool that also supports multiple other social media channels like DelightChat.
How does an inbox for WhatsApp streamline your customer support?
Managing customer conversations is already overwhelming and there are messages from different social media platforms, emails, and WhatsApp. And your brand reputation relies on how efficiently you handle and respond to them.
Things are somewhat all good until you are managing it alone.
But what happens when your customer queries scale and you have hundreds of messages per day? What happens when customers are complaining that they haven't received a reply for days. What if you want a system that makes it easy for your team to jump onboard and help out.
This is where a shared WhatsApp inbox comes in the picture!
It lets all your team members log into the dashboard, assign customer conversations to themselves, and start responding to them quickly.
Integrating a good all-in-one WhatsApp inbox tool can help:
- Make it easier to manage hundreds of customer messages by converting them to support tickets
- Assign WhatsApp support tickets to individual team members so you know who is responsible for what
- Close a ticket after the customer's query has been successfully resolved
- You can manage multiple WhatsApp numbers for multiple stores, from the same screen! Now that’s convenient!
Let’s talk further about what shared WhatsApp inboxes are!
What is a shared WhatsApp inbox?
A shared WhatsApp inbox is a collaborative team inbox that lets your entire team respond to customers over WhatsApp, live chat, and multiple social media channels from a single dashboard. Shared inboxes make it easy and efficient to manage customer support for your business.
While many tools offer different features, here are some of the useful features that DelightChat offers:
- Manage multiple WhatsApp business API numbers
- Integration with WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even emails
- Multi-store inboxes to separate customer conversations from multiple stores that you own
- Team management capabilities so you can see who is working on which conversations
- In app team collaboration with private messages and ticket assignment that lets your team members communicate to solve queries without leaving the app.
- Fast reply templates to speed up responses to common queries
How does a shared WhatsApp inbox work?
A shared inbox works by integrating with the WhatsApp business API. You need to have access to a WhatsApp Business API number. You can get access to one from a API provider like .
We will help you get your API number end-to-end until it's integrated to your inbox. We will also make a free Green Tick application to Meta for your business profile.
The shared WhatsApp inbox becomes your interface to talk to your customers. And now you are no longer limited to the default features and limitations of WhatsApp as a Business API user!
Can multiple team members use a shared inbox to respond to customers?
Yes! That’s the purpose of shared inboxes. You can have as many team members use the shared WhatsApp inbox as required. That is one of the reasons why the shared inbox came into being.
While many ecommerce store owners figured that their customers were active on WhatsApp, they knew it wasn’t easy to respond to all of them in time.
Access to the WhatsApp business API gave many software developers the opportunity to create a solution for this problem. And so the shared WhatsApp inbox was created.
How can a shared inbox for WhatsApp help your ecommerce business?
As your business grows, so does your team size. At this stage, opting for an expensive CRM to manage your customers will only eat into your profits.
Instead, what you need is a way for you to be able to give your support team members access to your business communication channels.
Shared inboxes are a better choice in the growing phases of your business. They serve the purpose of letting multiple team members log in and work on responding to customers without the high overheads.
How to set up a WhatsApp Inbox for your customer support team?
Now it’s time to set up your shared WhatsApp inbox so your customer support team can start using it.
There are three things you need before getting started:
- WhatsApp API (DelightChat helps you get API access)
- A shared inbox provider
- A Shopify store connected to your WhatsApp API provider and the shared inbox
If you choose to signup with DelightChat, we will help you get WhatsApp API access which only takes a day or two if your FB business manager is already verified.
After you’re all set, you can send invites to your team members to get them onboard with ease.
How do I manage a shared inbox?
Shared inbox management is a breeze!
Your team logs into the dashboard from their web browsers or mobile app.
Then they begin assigning support tickets to themselves and start responding to chat requests from different channels.
As the business owner, you have complete visibility into every action performed by your support team. You can oversee customer conversations and take over a conversation if required right from where the support team left off.
This gives you the flexibility to focus on what matters most to you without worrying about missing a customer message or lowering your support quality! Quite a win-win, ain’t it?
Benefits of a WhatsApp Team Inbox for your ecommerce customer support
Let's talk about some of the major benefits of using a shared WhatsApp inbox for your Shopify business.
1. All inboxes on one screen makes it easier to resolve queries
It’s annoying enough to keep switching between browser tabs! And then there’s a chance that you miss someone or accidentally mark their message as read without really responding to them.
With a shared inbox, you see customer messages from all your social channels on a single screen. This makes it easy to solve queries and respond to customers without switching tabs or missing a message ever again!
What’s more? With DelightChat, you can connect unlimited stores or channels at no extra cost.
2. Get all the team members onboard
Don’t share login credentials to your business accounts. With shared inboxes, you can create an account for your team members who can log in and access messages from all connected social channels on the same screen. They don’t need to log into each account from their personal devices to support your customers anymore.
One mobile app, and they’re all set to answer all customer queries right away!
3. Collaborate better with team members
When your support team needs assistance during a customer chat:
- They send conversation screenshots to other team members in a WhatsApp group
- Then wait for someone to check the screenshot
- They may ask for more context on it
- And then they finally help out
There is an easier way out! What if your team could chat with each other during customer conversations?
We built a private message option right on the customer chat screen. So your support agents can tag someone from the team to ask for help. The tagged member is notified and can check the customer conversation in real-time. They can even take over the conversation if required by assigning the support ticket to themselves.
4. Modify orders right on the chat screen
Customers may request order modification or cancellation. And you have to switch over to your Shopify dashboard, find the order placed by the customer, and process the request.
Being Shopify nerds, we knew this was an obvious problem. So we put on our thinking hats to find solutions and came up with a deep integration plan.
With a deep integration, you can now edit, cancel, refund, or duplicate orders right from your chat screen. No more switching back and forth!
5. Faster response times
Don’t miss customer messages. They love quick responses and it helps build your brand reputation when you respond on time.
With a customer support software that helps distribute the workload, you can reply to your customers quickly without ever missing a message.
Customers will love you for it and will be more likely to come back for more!
6. Make Inbox Zero possible for your business
Finally, the day has to come when you have ZERO messages left to answer! And that’s a great feeling! We enjoy having an inbox zero on WhatsApp and all our social channels.
When you can see all the responded and pending tickets on your screen, you know exactly what needs to be done.
As the entire team puts their effort into getting back to the customers quickly, you’ll see the pending tickets going down in number.
And soon enough, you will reach Inbox zero - the epitome of great customer service!
Try DelightChat: The Best WhatsApp Shared Inbox
Adding a shared inbox can be an instrumental change to how your business does customer support. At DelightChat, we are all Shopify nerds and understand the effort you take to build a great brand. And customer support forms an important part of the entire process.
So if you are in search of a customer support tool built with an ecommerce store owner's needs in mind, look no further. Not only that, we offer powerful WhatsApp marketing software that allows you to send broadcasts using the official API, setup automated abandoned cart recovery and much more using just one tool.
Sign up for free today and find out if we fit right with your business.
