Customer communication
Order confirmations, invoices, dispatch notices and payment reminders send over WhatsApp Business at the moment the record changes, not because someone remembered to type them. Replies land back on the customer, not on a phone that leaves the building with whoever answered it.
What is required
Stated plainly, because most of the difficulty is operational rather than technical: keeping a channel this immediate tied to the record it concerns.
An order confirmation, a dispatch notice or a payment reminder has to leave the moment the record changes state, not sit on a list of things somebody meant to send before the end of the day.
WhatsApp Business requires every outbound template to be pre-approved before it can send. Free text improvised per agent is not something the platform allows, and the integration has to work within that rather than around it.
When someone replies, that message has to land against the customer and the document it concerns, so the next person who opens the account sees the conversation rather than starting cold.
Sent is not delivered, and delivered is not read. A payment reminder nobody opened is a different problem from one that was ignored, and the difference has to be visible on the record.
How it runs
The happy path is short. What matters is that an undelivered message is somewhere a person will actually look.
What you get
Order confirmation, dispatch notice, invoice and payment-overdue messages send automatically from the workflow state that caused them, with no separate step for a person to forget.
Outbound messages draw from templates approved for your WhatsApp Business number, filled in from the record itself: customer name, invoice number, amount, due date.
Replies land against the customer and the document they concern, so a conversation about an invoice sits next to the invoice rather than in a phone that leaves the building with whoever answered it.
Sent, delivered and read status write back onto the message log, so whether a reminder actually reached someone stops being a guess.
A quotation sends as a formatted message pulled straight from the record, not a screenshot someone typed over by hand.
Your WhatsApp Business number, approved templates and opt-in handling are set up during implementation and confirmed with a live send before you go live.
Questions
You need a WhatsApp Business Platform number. If you do not have one, or want to migrate an existing one, that is set up as part of implementation and confirmed with a live send before go-live.
Yes. A reply lands in a thread against the customer and the document it concerns, so whoever opens the account next sees the conversation rather than starting cold.
Templates go through approval on the WhatsApp Business Platform before they can send. Until one is approved, that message type queues or falls back to email if you have one configured, rather than going out as unapproved free text.
Both. Automated sends cover confirmations and reminders, and an agent can hold a conversation from the same thread, logged against the same customer record either way.
Not on its own. It is the messaging channel tied to your records, so an order or invoice conversation happens against the document it concerns. Whether that becomes your whole support channel or one of several depends on how your team already works, and we scope that during implementation.
It is part of the Growth tier and above, alongside the rest of the connector, API and webhook capability. Implementation configures it against your number and your templates.
Sending order and payment updates by hand today? Email hello@alpineerp.com or call +1 307 400 9475. See also retail and supermarket chains.
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