Here are a few reasons: Conversations are personal and private so any particularly salty customer complaint will not be out there for the rest of the world to see. Users are always on.

Most WhatsApp users have push notifications turned on meaning they’ll see messages and be more engaged in company interactions WhatsApp’s broadcast lists make marketing to your customers’ friends who share similar passions simple and making service offers easier to share… provided they passes the spam sniff test. The opportunity to use WhatsApp for customer service may not be immediate but that is exactly why now is the time to think about the impact mobile apps like this have on the customer experience.

Adding a service channel that consumers use and trust makes sense to increase engagement and provide service on the terms of your customers. But if that channel is not fully integrated with access to customer data, reporting resources and the expertise of the contact center, it will hardly deliver an optimal experience.

By applying contact center best practices to mobile customer engagements could occur on WhatsApp, organizations can realize better value from the channel at a lower cost, without sacrificing the disciplines and service levels that are making the contact center the de facto center of the customer experience.

If for nothing else, it could be argued that the sole reason to think about what WhatsApp means for customer service is that with a reported 450 million active users WhatsApp has almost double Twitter’s 230 million active users. And, in the age of the “persistent conversation,” contact centers can’t afford to miss opportunities to connect with millions of customers.

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