Announcing the Much-Awaited Whatsapp Business Integration on Locale 🎉

While our existing features like real-time commenting and Slack notifications made a huge difference in how high-functioning operations teams collaborated with stakeholders during critical situations. Communication with people on the ground who are actually moving, and fixing things were still done over email, ticketing, and 3rd party messaging platforms.

A majority of businesses that we work with have ground teams that consist of subcontractors, warehouse operators, and 3PL vendors that don’t belong to their original workspace, and customers often expressed their desire to alert these people through the traditional channels their end users preferred.

This update is a massive step towards including the real people on the ground in the RCA loop every time something goes wrong.

With this integration now live, users can:

• Automatically send alerts to different WhatsApp mobile numbers when an alert is triggered on Locale
• Send details of orders to customers, warehouse operators, delivery executives, or basically anyone.
• Send custom notifications in situations like when an order is delayed.

All you need is a functioning WhatsApp number and a Meta developer account to get started. If you’re just starting out with WhatsApp business, we've written a detailed article in our Help Centre on setting up a brand-new business account with Whatsapp from scratch.

Stay tuned for more updates and follow us on Linkedin and on Twitter to stay updated on more such announcements.

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FAQs

What if I already have an active business account with WhatsApp?

Well, that’s actually awesome. All you need to do is to head over to your Org Settings on your Locale Dashboard to enable the Whatsapp integration with your existing business id and access token.

I already have a few alerts set up on Locale. Do I need to create new ones to enable Whatsapp messaging?

Not at all, you can easily edit your existing Alerts to add WhatsApp as a new notification channel. However, you will still need to create new messaging templates on your WhatsApp business account and have them approved by the WhatsApp team in order to get started.

Do I need to pay any additional fees for this service?

Yes and No — while Locale will not charge you any additional fees to set up WhatsApp as a notification channel. WhatsApp business charges its users based on the number of conversations. The good news is that the first 1000 conversations of each month are free. You can read more about their pricing here.

I need to talk to someone on your team

We’re always up for a chat. Simply drop a line at support@locale.ai and we’ll get in touch with you.