During the Christmas period, we like to use that quiet time when everybody is busy exchanging gifts and gorging themselves to work on some business improvements. This year was no exception and we utilised the season when the helpdesk phones get a break to upgrade our customer chat system.
We have used various web chat features over the years, with varying degrees of success. However, none has been the out and out winner in an age when chat, or instant messaging, has taken over from the spoken word as the primary means of communication.
Thanks to wide adoption of messaging platforms, people are now very accustomed to chat applications to stay in touch with old friends, leave a note for their nearest and dearest as well as access customer service departments. By far and away the leader of these messaging platforms is WhatsApp, with more than 2 billion users globally in 2022 and growing.
We noticed that the big names are now adding WhatsApp as an option to access service and engage with the business. So, we set about our annual yuletide project to get in on the action too.
Many online services and applications now offer integrations with WhatsApp to take advantage of the wide user base and convenience of easy mobile and desktop chat communication. We used these same integrations to connect with our existing profile on Meta - the company that operates Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. After creating and authenticating our WhatsApp business account, we connected up integrations using the necessary APIs and webhooks then testing, testing and more testing.
Several weeks later, we are pleased to announce that we are now online and ready to chat with you today on WhatsApp. We are excited to see what benefits it adds to our service delivery and really like the secure, encrypted channel that it provides us to exchange information. Hopefully, for our customers, it adds an additional, convenient and simple method to access our services.
We look forward to chatting with you soon.
James Naylor
James Naylor is ITbuilder's Managing Director and Founder. He has worked in technology since the early nineties and, after a decade in the corporate world, went into business himself.
James has lead ITbuilder for over two decades, building the business into the force that it is today, but is still a technician at heart and still very hands on with tech.
Despite growing up in Hertfordshire, James lives in the Netherlands for five years as well as London, before returning and setting up the base in Hertford, where he lives today.
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