3 Ways WeChat Integration Drives a Global Engagement Strategy

Considering WeChat integration? WeChat is a crucial component of any global engagement strategy for businesses with international customers. Attracting 1.17 billion worldwide users, WeChat reaches many people that other channels cannot.Yet there are some key challenges to making it work well for international businesses.

While WeChat offers a plethora of opportunities for business, it’s not an easy channel to handle. And WeChat integration can make it a lot easier.

What struggles do global businesses face when managing WeChat?

While still banned in India, the once uncertain future of WeChat now appears to be a relatively stable means of engaging the Chinese demographic from just about everywhere else in the world - following President Biden’s revocation of an executive order to possibly block its use in America. As a key gateway to this huge market for foreign businesses, WeChat offers international companies a huge opportunity that cannot be ignored.

However, Chinese WeChat Official Accounts come with fuller functionality than overseas Official Accounts, and local Chinese phone numbers, identities and native personal WeChat accounts are required to access Chinese WeChat and other support platforms. Also, creating content for WeChat requires more than just translation – there are some specific strategies and tools needed to leverage its full potential.

Missing out on WeChat’s social networking power

The true power of WeChat is its massive social network. This super app has over a billion active users who rely on it for their daily needs, such as:

• Message with friends, family and colleagues
• Receiving social news and brand updates
• Use smart public services such as healthcare through Mini Programs
• Shop online from WeChat Minishops (微店)
• WeChat Pay for offline and online payments – WeChat Pay is China’s largest e-wallet
• Following influencers’ live stream videos
• Watch short videos on WeChat Channels (视频号)
• Play WeChat games
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How do brands handle customer service on WeChat?

An effective WeChat marketing strategy revolves around customer interaction – which of course includes efficient and effective customer service. CINNOX makes this easy to integrate alongside other communications channels – but first, we’ll consider some alternatives.

In-built Customer Service feature on WeChat’s backend

A native Customer Service feature allows WeChat customers to send messages or multimedia files to an agent, providing a basic support tool right out of the box.

Brands can easily answer enquiries with this feature – but with some critical limitations:

• No new message alert: Operators only see inbound messages by refreshing the dashboard, making live interaction with customers nearly impossible.
• No customer segmentation: You can star important followers, but that’s about it. As your fan base grows, it will only get messier without a CRM.
• Limited data retention: When a message comes in, the dashboard can only store it for five days – a significant loss of important data for businesses.

Using third-party platforms based in China

Because of these limitations, many businesses subscribe to third-party customer service platforms. As user-friendly as they seem, you may need to consider their global accessibility – as most require local phone numbers or domestic payment methods. Also, without proper CRM integration, your communication data may be scattered across third-party platforms making it hard to access, or worse, not data-compliant.

Self-developing a customer service platform

‍Larger, more well-established businesses looking to engage Chinese customers may consider tailoring their own platform that meets their unique requirements, using APIs. However, this approach takes a longer time, as well as significant investment and manpower to build and maintain such platforms.

WeChat integration with CINNOX for easy, powerful global customer engagement

Being present on WeChat doesn’t have to be complicated. CINNOX provides an easy, powerful omnichannel engagement solution, which helps you connect with Chinese customers in the same engagement environment as your other markets – giving you key upgraded functions.

• Instant and full visibility to WeChat: Through the power of omnichannel engagement, you won’t miss any WeChat messages, as enquiries from all channels are easily visible in a single interface, with clear message alerts.
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• Global accessibility: Your globally distributed team can access and attend to WeChat messages anywhere on any device, from anywhere in the world.
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• Rich multimedia interaction: While WeChat only supports live chat and limited media sharing, CINNOX boosts your interaction game with the hybrid use of calls and screen sharing, using web link and QR codes.
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• Keeping the right customers: Leverage contact management tools to segment customer profiles via multi-level tags, or integrate your own CRM system.
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• The best agent for each customer: Develop deeper customer relationships efficiently by ensuring every WeChat customer is connected to the right person, so you can cater to an influx of inbound enquiries with efficiency.
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• Collaborative customer engagement: Empower your team to deliver a seamless customer experience, with group chats and chat transfer.
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• Secure and compliant: Every customer interaction, from chat log to shared media, is properly recorded and stored, and cannot be altered.