Facebook and WhatsApp Join Forces
Meta, during the Conversations event in Mumbai on September 20, unveiled a range of fresh capabilities for WhatsApp Businesses. These features aim to facilitate smooth customer interactions by allowing businesses to create in-chat experiences. Among the three features announced were WhatsApp multiple payment options, Meta Verified badges, and WhatsApp Flows. While the first two features are straightforward, WhatsApp Flows has sparked curiosity and confusion among users. To gain a better understanding, let’s delve deeper into what WhatsApp Flows is and how it operates.
What is WhatsApp Flows
WhatsApp has explained in a blog post: “We’re launching Flows to enable businesses to offer more experiences, such as quickly choosing a train seat, ordering a meal or making an appointment – all without leaving the chat. Flows allows businesses to offer rich menus and customizable forms that support different needs.”
Basically, this is an automation tool like Microsoft Power Automate or Salesforce Flow, but it’s entirely in your chat window. In fact, such automation tools already exist in WhatsApp, but they are used by third-party chatbots. You may have come across them while interacting with your bank or mobile network operator when they ask you to type a message and then show you a series of clickable options that will take you to your destination.
But with WhatsApp Flow, not only is there no need for such chatbots, such automation flows are better optimized (like those created by the native platform) and can be used for a wider range of tasks.
We’ll know more about it as more people see this feature in their app.
How does WhatsApp Flows work?
That’s a little harder to answer because we haven’t seen the feature in action yet. Also, due to its slow adoption, most companies still don’t have access to it or haven’t adopted it to build their automation flows.
But since most automation tools follow a similar logical pattern, they most likely work this way. These tools allow you to build a logic gate that directs customers to a specific destination. Consider the following course.
The customer participates in the WhatsApp chat of a company that sells clothes. Flow first greets the customer and asks if he is buying a man, woman, boy or girl. The customer can simply type the answer or select it by tapping on the option. The next message comes and asks if the customer wants to buy casual clothes, party clothes, sports clothes and more.
When the customer selects an option, the flow offers more detailed options to narrow down what the customer really wants and help them see the list.
This is just one example, but with WhatsApp Flows, users can potentially buy a ticket for a movie, bus or flight, clothes, book an appointment, know the answer to a certain query and much more.
We still need to see the feature in action to really know if this is how the WhatsApp feature works or if it is even more advanced. This will happen when the feature is released soon.
