WhatsApp Business multiple users: A beginners guide

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app available on Android and iOS, with over 2 billion active WhatsApp accounts. There are already over 50 million businesses with active WhatsApp Business accounts.

These trends are a good starting point to help you decide whether it’s time to leverage WhatsApp as a channel to support your customers and how to go about it. This piece discusses answers to questions such as: What can you do with a WhatsApp Business account? Does the WhatsApp Business app support multiple users? Which WhatsApp solution is right for you?

We will break down how multiple users work on the WhatsApp Business app and API, which is better, and the challenges and benefits of selecting one over the other. Let’s dive in.

WhatsApp Business for multiple users: Different business sizes

WhatsApp has two offerings—WhatsApp Business app and WhatsApp business API, based on the size of the business, and both have different ways to add multiple users and multiple devices.

WhatsApp Business app: For micro and small businesses

WhatsApp Business is a free-to-download app launched in 2018 that was built to help micro and small businesses communicate more efficiently and securely with their customers. It has all the features of regular WhatsApp messenger, along with features like quick replies and labels to help businesses sort and quickly respond to customer messages. 

The WhatsApp Business app allows you to use WhatsApp Business for multiple users across multiple devices. You can link WhatsApp Business on up to five devices, comprising one phone and four additional devices for each WhatsApp number.

WhatsApp Business Premium allows you to create a more professional WhatsApp web page and has multi-agent, multi-device support for up to 10 devices.

While the WhatsApp Business app is a good starting point for micro and small businesses, you will need more sophisticated tools and automation to deliver premium customer support as your business grows.

WhatsApp Business API: For SMBs, mid-size companies, and enterprises

When it comes to SMBs, medium-scale, or large businesses, the requirement changes from being available on WhatsApp to proactive customer engagement, addressing high chat volumes, providing self-service to their customers, improving resolution time, keeping track of performance metrics of chatbots and agents, and also being able to scale by adding team members.

WhatsApp Business API allows businesses to do all this, in addition to connecting it with their CRM, automating processes through their existing tech stack, sending Whatsapp messages, assigning repetitive tasks to bots or AI, using contacts from databases instead of relying on phone contacts, and much more.

How to use WhatsApp Business app with multiple users

If you are a micro or small business looking to provide support to your customer on WhatsApp with basic functionalities, business messaging, and a few support agents for free, then the WhatsApp Business app is for you. 

How to add multiple users on the WhatsApp Business app

Adding multiple users to the WhatsApp Business app is a fairly simple process and takes only a few minutes. On the WhatsApp Business app, you can use a maximum of five devices—one mobile phone and four additional devices (PC/ mobile/ tablet) with the same phone number.

Let’s examine how to add multiple users/devices on WhatsApp settings. This process is easy and takes only a few minutes on an iPhone or any Android device.

• Go to your WhatsApp Business app on your primary phone

• Tap the icon with three vertical dots

• Click “Linked devices”

• Click on “Link a device”

• Scan the QR code, and you are done

Limitations of multiple users of the WhatsApp Business app

Although at first glance, having multiple users with the WhatsApp Business app looks like a free and quick fix to provide better support on WhatsApp, eventually, as the query volume increases, even for a micro or small business, it will be a pain to deliver a great customer experience and ensure agent productivity at the same time. Let’s take a look at those reasons.

• Can’t assign a chat to a specific agent

• No way to track missed chats 

• No way to prioritize or deprioritize a chat

• No way to mark chats as resolved 

• Multiple agents can end up working with the same customer from different devices, creating a lot of confusion for your business and customers

• No way to track user details, orders, or previous conversations with other agents

• No way to track agent performance, resolved queries, or even missed ones

• No chatbot support

And because of all these limitations, using the WhatsApp Business app is just a quick fix to support your customers initially. However, if you are looking for a full-stack Meta solution to deliver a great experience to your customers and agents, a superior alternative is to use WhatsApp Business API integration with Freshchat.

How to use WhatsApp Business API with multiple users

Setting up your Whatsapp Business API is more complicated than simply downloading an app like Whatsapp Business, as described above. WhatsApp offers the Business API (a set of codes) and is not ready-to-use software. It must be used either by a custom-built platform or via customer messaging software such as Freshchat. This software can leverage all the offerings of WhatsApp API and can also provide agent-side automation, streamlined workflow, analytics with real-time dashboards, and native integration with other messaging channels.

How to access WhatsApp Business API with Freshchat?

As Freshchat has native integration with WhatsApp Business API and is also an official Business Service Provider of WhatsApp, setting it up with Freshchat is extremely easy. For that:

1. Sign up for Freshchat

2. Select WhatsApp as a messaging channel

3. Apply for WhatsApp Business API

We’ll help you with the application and approval process of WhatsApp API, which will take 3-5 days. Once that is done, you can add any number of agents to the WhatsApp channel and start supporting your customers.

How do you add multiple users on the WhatsApp Business API with Freshchat?

By using a customer messaging solution like Freshchat, you can add any number of agents to support your customers on WhatsApp and even on other messaging apps. Adding a user in Freshchat is an easy process. To add a user in Freshchat

• Go to Settings > Manage Users

• Fill in details of the user, such as name and email ID

• Choose the role of the user such as Support Agent 

• Click save, and you are done

The advantage of using WhatsApp API with a customer messaging solution like Freshchat is that the multiple users you have added to your account have a team inbox from where they can access and respond to customer queries from different channels, such as your website and other messaging channels, and also answer queries from WhatsApp.

Benefits of using multiple users with WhatsApp Business API and Freshchat

Wouldn’t it be great if your customers could just help themselves with simple queries like checking their order status or even shopping on WhatsApp without having to contact an agent? WhatsApp Business API enables you to deploy bots and create self-service flows to help your customers apart from allowing agents to help your customers.

Here are some of the major use cases and benefits of using the WhatsApp Business API and Freshchat integration:

Support Benefits:

1. Deploy chatbots that auto-replies to FAQs and simple customer queries. Hand over conversations to agents only when required.

2. Equip agents with order and customer details, so they have better context about customer queries.

3. Improve agent efficiency by automatically tagging chats based on messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or social media channels like Instagram, so they don’t have to manually search for chats from a specific channel.

4. Track the performance of your support team with a real-time dashboard and make sure your team is adhering to the SLAs.

5. Send invoices, and order details directly to customers using WhatsApp API templates.

6. Provide self-service options such as checking account details, renewing your subscription, or canceling the order.

WhatsApp marketing and sales benefits:

1. Send proactive campaigns with the help of WhatsApp templates. A great example of this is e-commerce stores sharing discounts or even promoting referral programs

2. Run ads on Facebook and Instagram, that will directly open a conversation on WhatsApp.

3. Build a full-fledged e-commerce store experience on WhatsApp to provide a better buying experience.

4. Send cart reminders to customers to improve sales and reduce the cart abandonment rate. 

Get started with Whatsapp for Business today.

WhatsApp for business is here to stay. It’s an easy-to-use platform that provides the necessary statistics about your messages' performance. However, it is important to consider your business size and needs while choosing between the WhatsApp business app and API.

While the WhatsApp Business app looks attractive to micro and small businesses because it is free, you will need a robust WhatsApp solution as you grow your business. A solution like Freshchat will give you the best out of the WhatsApp Business API, help you integrate all your business communication channels into a single, unified interface, and support automation across the board (messaging, website, and apps).