WhatsApp Business with multiple users: A Beginner's Guide

If you are a business owner operating in today’s digital world, then you’d be exposed to WhatsApp Business. WhatsApp’s highly popular business tool has garnered the love and attention of businesses across various sectors because of its excellent features. Through this article, we will show how you can enable multiple users to access your WhatsApp Business account and simultaneously work on multiple tasks in a synchronized manner.

What is WhatsApp Business?

Since you’ve landed on this page, we assume that you are one such business owner who uses WhatsApp Business to boost your brand value and revenue. If not, it’s important to know about the platform before proceeding any further.

WhatsApp Business is the business version of WhatsApp, the popular messaging application that is used by over 2 billion customers worldwide. WhatsApp Business is used by small-to-medium businesses to communicate with their customers and engage with them effectively. It helps businesses to generate more leads, connect with customers, and offer instant assistance to their customers. Its unique features include auto-replies, multilingual support, and customized labels among others. Businesses prefer WhatsApp Business because of its ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and reliability.

Can multiple users use the same WhatsApp Business account?

When using the free WhatsApp Business platform, businesses will be able to link up to five devices including their mobile phone to their WhatsApp business number. For small businesses, this is highly beneficial as it helps them manage their customer communications efficiently and assist them instantly. But it might not help businesses that are in the growth phase because the five device limit can be a setback for them as they expand their business. This is especially true in the case of businesses that has a global client base.

If you are a small business owner, then adding multiple users to your WhatsApp Business account can help you tide through the initial phase of growth. However, you might need a more powerful tool as the number of global clients increases.

Limitations of using free WhatsApp Business on multiple devices

WhatsApp Business is a great tool for small businesses and its ability to add multiple devices allows businesses to efficiently use their team to communicate with a large group of customers. However, there are a few limitations to adding multiple devices to the free WhatsApp Business platform. They are as follows:

• Not all devices that are linked to the primary WhatsApp number can create and edit broadcast lists. It can only be done through the primary mobile number.
• Business owners cannot view live locations on the linked devices.
• A team member using one of the devices will not be able to instantly access the inbox in any of the other linked devices.
• Linking multiple devices and sharing them with different users will pose a greater data and privacy threat.

You can also read on WhatsApp vs WhatsApp Business to know more about the limitations.

In addition to these limitations, your business will also have a hard time scaling up since you need more time to collate all the chats across devices and generate meaningful insights from them. As your customer base grows, you might not even be able to render instant assistance as there might be a disconnect between all the users logged on to the devices. While there are several hacks that you can use to bypass these limitations, they aren’t without their own risks. And these risks include a permanent ban from WhatsApp, which would be devastating for any company.

WhatsApp Business API

Another method to break through the limitations of WhatsApp Business is to use WhatsApp Business API. WhatsApp Business API is the application interface that WhatsApp has created to help medium-to-large businesses engage with their customers.

WhatsApp Business API is a customizable programming interface that enables businesses to seamlessly transfer WhatsApp data to their preferred business interface. It also allows them to build custom message flows and chatbots to engage with their customers. Since the API is a back-end interface, businesses need to partner with WhatsApp Business Service Providers (BSP) who were selected by WhatsApp. Businesses will be able to use a host of automation features like automatic replies, and chatbots and integrate the application with various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc. For a detailed outline of WhatsApp’s advantages & features, you can check out our WhatsApp API blog.

Use WhatsApp from multiple devices using WhatsApp Business API

WhatsApp Business API allows a business owner to link multiple devices to their WhatsApp business account. Unlike the five device limitation of WhatsApp Business, the API allows an unlimited number of devices to use the same account. Since the API can be completely customized based on your existing CRM system, you as a business owner can seamlessly add users across various devices including mobile phones, tablets and desktops. This allows your team to work on multiple chats in a synchronized manner while ensuring a seamless transition of conversations between team members.

Whatsapp Business API: Multiple logins for multiple users

In addition to multi-device support, WhatsApp API also allows businesses to connect multiple users to the same account. Since the API supports real-time logins from various devices, business owners can instantly give WhatsApp inbox and chatbot access to any team member.  In addition, business owners can also add these users within minutes and give them varying levels of permission to limit their authority. For example, business owners can limit access to low-level employees to ensure that they are privy to only messages that they’ve been assigned.

Introducing WhatsApp Team Inbox

To help large businesses seamlessly connect multiple agents with multiple customers, WhatsApp Business API provides a shared team inbox feature. With this shared inbox, businesses can allow an unlimited number of users to share the same inbox and see all the customer interactions. This is highly beneficial for growing businesses as they will be able to provide instant assistance to their clients, even as they send out multiple messages to several customers. In addition to the WhatsApp application and chatbot, you can integrate even Facebook and Instagram when you partner with an experienced BSP like Gallabox. Interested to know more about the WhatsApp Shared Inbox? Click here!

5 Benefits of using Whatsapp Team Inbox via Whatsapp API for multiple users

The WhatsApp Team Inbox provides a way to streamline customer communications in a fast-paced business environment. Since fast-growing businesses need to handle multiple customer queries in a short span of time, the WhatsApp Team Inbox can act as a buffer to manage these communications with ease. If you are a business owner that’s contemplating the benefits of using WhatsApp API’s team inbox, we’d like to list its five major advantages:

Ensure an Omnichannel Experience

One of the primary benefits of using the WhatsApp API shared inbox is that your business will be able to provide the same customer experience across platforms. Since the free WhatsApp Business app only allows for five devices, you might not be able to keep up with increased customer demand as you grow and look to increase the number of devices using any of the hacks or just add a completely different business number to handle a part of the clients.

While this might be effective in the short term, it will seriously hinder how your customers perceive your business and how you interact with them in the long term. Since the shared team inbox allows multiple users to share the same screen, you can ensure that all of your business communications stay consistent even when you expand.

Provide a seamless Customer Journey

WhatsApp’s shared inbox allows your team to seamlessly work together to solve critical customer queries. For example, users can add comments to explain customer issues. Your team members can assign complete customer conversations to a manager or you, the business owner, to ensure that the customer issue gets resolved immediately and that the customer has a superior experience.

Increase your Brand Reputation

With the use of a WhatsApp shared team inbox, you can engage with your customers on a more personal level. Since you can add even the smallest of details as comments and labels, your team would know more information about a customer. This enables them to have a deeper conversation with the customer and create strong brand associations. Moreover, when you give every user access to different messages, it helps your team to become active participants in the communication, rather than just being the receiver.

Generate excellent Insights

WhatsApp’s team inbox allows you to label both customers and specific conversations. These labels can be used to sort customer conversations and provide instant insights on critical issues. You can even give customers a status with respect to their engagement with your team by adding an open, waitlist, or closed label to a specific conversation. Using Gallabox’s shared inbox, you can generate reports based on these labels and further analyze these results to create effective growth strategies.

Automate conversation flows

With the shared inbox, you can even automate chat flows within a conversation. Since you can tag a conversation as a part of a lead nurturing sequence or for specific campaigns, you can automate these chats and create a conversation journey for your customers. While this can be done without the shared inbox, the process can be made a lot easier with that. In addition, the inbox also allows you to automate multiple conversations simultaneously.

Enable multiple users on WhatsApp Business with Gallabox. Now that you’ve understood the importance of using WhatsApp API and the shared inbox, you might be looking to integrate the application interface into your business process. To make sure that you get the most benefit from WhatsApp API, you can check out Gallabox. Gallabox is a leading WhatsApp Business Partner that has helped businesses with WhatsApp integrations, chatbots and shared inbox solutions. Sign up and start increasing your profits.

Further Reading:

Find additional articles that may interest you,

1. WhatsApp For Customer Service: How You Can Use WhatsApp for Effective Customer Support
2. How to integrate your Shopify store with WhatsApp
3. Tips to master WhatsApp Business Broadcast: Send bulk messages to your customers in a few easy steps