You may be hearing a lot of buzz right now about WeChat Work, Tencent’s enterprise-grade office management platform that is being adopted by a growing number of Chinese and international brands to improve both their internal and external communications.

With the ability to connect with the WeChat ecosystem plus its app marketplace providing a host of tools, WeChat Work allows companies to have greater control and transparency over how their employees are interacting with clients on WeChat, while also giving employees access to a wide variety of features and capabilities which can boost their efficiency and effectiveness.

But how does it do that? In this article we will take a look at three industries: luxury, financial services, and retail, and show specifically how WeChat Work used in combination with ChatLabs Sales, is able to solve key problems these industries face in China.

With the prevalence of WeChat among Chinese consumers, it has become common for sales associates in many industries, but luxury in particular, to add clients and potential customers as friends on their personal WeChat accounts as a means to develop and maintain relationships with those consumers.

Yet WeChat was not built for clienteling, and using it for this purpose will lead to a number of problems. Here are a couple of them along with ways that WeChat Work can solve the problem.

Verified Profile

For example, a sales associate (SA) using a personal WeChat account to communicate with a client can come across as unprofessional and untrustworthy. Clients have no way of knowing whether the SA works for the company and the SA might share personal images on their WeChat Moments.

More importantly, customer data and relationship owned by the SA, if the SA leaves, the client’s information and interaction history is lost.

One of the biggest benefits of WeChat Work is that SAs are able to engage in professional 1:1 communication with customers through a verified account. The customer is able to use WeChat, while simultaneously chatting with an SA on WeChat Work.

Because the SA has been verified, the customer will be able to see which company they work for and their company contact information, which is far more trustworthy than communicating with someone on their personal WeChat Account.

And with WeChat Work, brands own the contacts. If an SA moves on to another company, the brand keeps the contacts and is able to redistribute them to other SAs.

Assigning an Associate

When clients reach out for customer service, brands can assign a specific store associate to the client by providing an SA WeChat Work QR Code. This allows customer concerns or complaints to be resolved with a personal touch.

Integrate Data from All Touchpoints

Another problem with using WeChat for clienteling is that the data is siloed. Without integrating data from all customer touchpoints such as POS, CRM, and WeChat, SAs are getting a fragmented view of the client. This means that segmentation is only occurring through manual tagging by the SA based on their interactions with the clients.

With the ChatLabs Sales mini program built for WeChat Work, brands can use customers’ Union IDs to pull in information from multiple sources and collect their WeChat footprint, i.e. all their interactions within a brand’s Official Accounts, H5s and or open platform enabled mini programs.

This enables the brand to form a complete client profile and have more detailed and accurate tagging and segmentation.

Send Broadcast Messages in a Personal Format

Through WeChat Work, SAs are also able to send mass broadcast messages such as coupons, product updates, or event notifications to a group of their contacts.

The ability to mass message is a huge time saver for the SA, but to the client it appears the message has been personally sent to them. Because of this, these messages tend to have a higher clickthrough rate than messages sent on the brand’s Official Account.

What’s more, management can assign broadcast messages to SAs. Once SAs receive a broadcast request from management, only a one-click authorization is required for the post to be sent.

While WeChat is a key means of connecting with the Chinese consumer, allowing employees to use WeChat for business communications has always been difficult for financial services firms due to regulatory and compliance concerns.

Chat Archiving

For example chat archiving, which is extremely important for financial services firms from a brand safety and legal perspective, is not allowed on WeChat, however, WeChat Work has an official API to support this.

To archive a chat with WeChat Work, when the employee wants to chat with a client, they must first send a consent request form. Once the client has given consent, the chat may begin. If the client does not give consent, the employee is not able to archive the conversation with said client.

Using this method, SAs can save 180 days of chat histories between them and their clients. However, with WeChat Work alone, the chat archiving feature is currently still somewhat limited.

For example, managers will not be able to see employee chat histories from the WeChat Work backend. That’s where ChatLabs comes in. Our ChatLabs Sales management platform uses Tencent’s API to save the chat histories.

In the ChatLabs Sales management platform, managers are able to review chats, search for specific chats, download messages and even receive alerts when certain sensitive keywords are mentioned in conversations, allowing them to catch potential issues before they arise.

Currently chat archiving is limited to companies in the financial services industry including insurance, banking, securities, etc. however Tencent may open it up to other industries in the near future.

As customer acquisition is becoming more costly in China, brands are placing increased emphasis on customer retention through the use of CRM systems. Yet many of these systems are on in-store computers and tablets, meaning when SAs are not in the store or office there is no way of viewing customer profiles or adding additional notes.

This lack of access to key information could cause SAs to miss opportunities, or they may lose clients due to slow response time. It may also cause important information to not be recorded because the SA forgets to log it by the time they are able to get back on the CRM platform.

CRM Mini Program for WeChat Work

For companies facing this issue, a CRM mini program for WeChat Work, such as ChatLabs Sales, is a convenient solution. Because ChatLabs Sales is a mini program on the WeChat Work app, SAs are able to view complete client profiles, take notes, and respond to client messages all within WeChat Work without having to switch between interfaces. They can simply close the mini program and continue chatting with the client.

Integrated Data

Remember in Use Case One we mentioned the ability to integrate data from all brand WeChat properties?

When using a CRM on WeChat Work, all of this data can be pulled in. When a lead expresses interest in any of your brand’s products or services by taking an action in your brand’s WeChat ecosystem (WeChat OA/MP/H5), SAs will be notified when thresholds for certain key metrics such as life cycle and social scores are met. With integrated CRM data, SAs won’t miss out on potential lead conversion opportunities.

Monitoring Team Performance

With WeChat Work, managers have transparency into their team’s performance. They can easily see the number of active employees, how many new customers they are engaging with, number of chats, average response time, reply rate, etc.

Conclusion

WeChat Work allows enterprises in China to operate much more efficiently than they ever could on WeChat alone, yet still provide a personal touch. It allows brands to pull in data from a wide variety of sources to obtain a more complete picture of their customers and thereby provide them with more relevant offerings. And it allows leaders to more easily manage teams, assign tasks, and review results.

This article features several of the most common WeChat Work use cases - what industries or functions would you like us to feature next? Send me an email at Xiana@ChatLabs.com and let me know!