In South Africa, WhatsApp has firmly established itself as the absolute communication channel of choice, with research from Statista showing that 94% of local internet users – representing roughly 28 to 29 million people – are active on the platform. For businesses, establishing an official presence on WhatsApp is no longer just a trend; it is a necessity.
Organisations that do not have an official account risk having customer service conversations take place on private channels, resulting in a complete lack of visibility and control. By setting up clear policies and an official account for business interactions, companies can securely meet their customers on the platform they already trust.
Modern consumer expectations are fundamentally changing. For a long time, individual users have been able to message each other via text and seamlessly switch to a data-based audio call on WhatsApp. Today, they expect that same fluidity from the brands they interact with. Ultimately, when complex situations arise or there is a sense of urgency, voice remains the most human way to resolve an issue, build a relationship, or close a deal.
What WhatsApp Business Calling brings
WhatsApp Business Calling allows companies to create a true end-to-end messaging journey, where customers can seamlessly call and message a business within the very same thread.
- For Businesses: WhatsApp Business Calling provides professional tools to make every call count without adding new complexities. For inbound calls, it acts similarly to a toll-free number, and the business is billed for the call per minute, at an affordable rate of around 10c per minute. Businesses can also use it for outbound calling, with early testers reporting that adding calling to the communication mix can skyrocket conversion rates from 2% up to 45%, according to the Mobile Ecosystem Forum. Outbound calls are also billed per minute.
- For Customers: Firstly, it gives people the ability to communicate with brands using their platform of choice. Research also shows that 76% of consumers want the option to smoothly switch between messaging and calling depending on their immediate preference. It also delivers incredible convenience and cost savings. Because it uses data instead of airtime, it is a highly cost-effective alternative for users travelling abroad who want support without facing high international roaming fees or prepaid SIM restrictions.
Putting CX at the core by giving customers a choice
The driving force behind these changes is the ability to give customers the choice to stay within their preferred channel.
- Seamless Escalation: A customer can initiate an interaction with a digital agent and, if needed, ask to be escalated to a human agent. They can be seamlessly transferred to the first available human agent or be placed in a queue, similar to a traditional call centre experience.
- Retained Context: With WhatsApp Business Calling, the chat and the call occur in the same window, meaning that service agents immediately have access to the customer’s history and context, ensuring that the customer never has to repeat themselves.
- Frictionless Journeys: Innovations like IVR support, click-to-call buttons, and deep links enable journeys that start on websites or digital ads to flow effortlessly into a WhatsApp voice call.
How Businesses Can Use WhatsApp Business Calling
The platform caters to both reactive and proactive communication models:
- Inbound Calling: Customers easily initiate a data call directly from the chat window. The business covers the per-minute billing for the call.
- Outbound Calling: Companies using WhatsApp Business also have the power to initiate outbound calls, though this requires strict compliance with Meta’s rules, which are aimed at protecting its users from being flooded with spam calls. Businesses must send a pre-approved template message to users, first asking for permission to call; once accepted, they have a 72-hour window to make the call. Users can also change their minds, and this requires active polling to ensure the user hasn’t revoked their consent before calls are made.
While outbound calls through WhatsApp Business might not be the default choice due to these strict regulations and cost, they are highly effective for specific, proactive scenarios like loan approvals or collections, or for recovering high-value customer journeys. End users might be more receptive to taking a call, because they have already received a message informing them of what the call will be about. Furthermore, because WhatsApp displays a verified business name and logo rather than an unknown number, contactability and call pickup rates are significantly boosted.
The benefits of integrating WhatsApp into your broader ecosystem
Integrating WhatsApp Business into a broader communications ecosystem enables powerful data consolidation and advanced functionality.
- Security and Compliance: WhatsApp offers robust end-to-end encryption, making it incredibly secure for sending or receiving sensitive documents like invoices or tickets. However, when this information enters a company’s system of record, businesses must ensure it is handled in compliance with local requirements. This includes board-reaching privacy regulations such as POPIA, as well as requirements governing individual industries, which may have their own guidelines on how private information must be stored, and how long it can be stored for (such as FICA for the financial services industry).
- Business-Grade Analytics: Being integrated into the broader communications ecosystem allows organisations to do much more with their voice calls, including unlocking cloud-based capabilities such as regulatory-compliant call recording, sentiment analysis, transcription, and quality assurance, amongst others.
Find out why WhatsApp Business works for the SA audience, and how brands can seamlessly integrate it into the rest of their channels, in this conversation between Kelvin Brown, our Customer Operations Executive, and Martie de Beer, our CCaaS Executive.
The technology is continuously expanding, designed for the way modern teams communicate. Looking ahead, WhatsApp plans to enable seamless escalation from audio to video calls, as well as the ability for businesses to send voice notes directly to customers, offering even richer and faster conversations.
While businesses can go directly to Meta to deploy WhatsApp Business Calling, the setup is highly complex and requires significant technical capabilities that many organisations lack. A common pitfall is trying to force this cutting-edge technology to replicate inefficient, old-fashioned legacy systems.
With 95,000 users across SA, Lesotho, the UK, and Canada, Telviva is a South African market leader in cloud-based unified communications and contact centre solutions. Telviva’s platform already unifies voice calls, video conferencing, instant messaging, web chat, and WhatsApp Business into a single interface. As such, Telviva serves as an expert guide for journey mapping, system integration, and setup, ensuring that your new channels are fully optimised.
Improving customer experience demands that you are present where your customers are. Do not miss out on vital opportunities – partner with Telviva today to implement WhatsApp Business Calling and secure your competitive edge. Click the chat button to get started.