It’s your biggest time of the year and your sales and service teams are overloaded. But customers still expect personal attention and to have all their questions answered, especially for high-consideration products and services.

How do you make sure they get the top-notch customer experience they expect?

For businesses that benefit from a consultative approach to selling, seasonal sales around holidays and Mega Sales Days like Black Friday or 11.11 can be both an opportunity and a challenge. They create an opportunity for a big boost in customer acquisition and revenue, but handling a high volume of 1:1 customer interactions can be challenging for sales and customer service teams. Consultative selling requires building trust, understanding customer needs, and providing recommendations and guidance before sealing the deal with a sale. And that’s not always easy during peak shopping times.

That’s why companies like home goods brand Multicenter take advantage of WhatsApp for Business to create an outstanding consultative customer experience at scale.

Using WhatsApp, Multicenter’s live agents can provide customers with a personalized shopping experience, even when sales are surging. It enables them to accelerate response times, better serve customers 1:1, and increase sales.

We’ll go into more detail on Multicenter’s success soon, but first, how can you think about using WhatsApp to enable a consultative shopping experience for your customers?

Business messaging on WhatsApp is a powerful way to shape and elevate the consultative selling experience during holiday and Mega Sales Day peaks, when efficiency at scale is essential.

For example, merchants can use ads that click to WhatsApp to create awareness of seasonal promotions and generate leads. Once the customer clicks on an ad to initiate a WhatsApp conversation with the business, the merchant can provide recommendations, answer customer questions, and facilitate checkout and fulfillment all within a single messaging thread, leveraging automation as needed. And if customers opt-in, merchants can build on that relationship and trust with future marketing messages to cross-sell and upsell products, or to deliver personalized offers.

Messaging can be a highly convenient channel for customers, who can get all the information they need to make a decision and purchase, without ever leaving WhatsApp.

Here's an example of how you can bring consultative selling to life:

1. Discovery: Target your audience on Facebook and Instagram with ads that click to WhatsApp
2. Consideration: Capture prospect information and opt-ins for future messages, and help customers convert in-thread with catalogs, rich media experiences, and the ability to interact with chatbots and human agents
3. Re-Engagement: Bring customers back into the conversation with automated reminders through marketing messages
4. Purchase & Post-Purchase: Facilitate conversion and send utility messages to convey order, shipping, and payment information
5. Re-Engagement: Post-conversion, retarget opted-in customers with personalized offers

For Multicenter, using WhatsApp for Business to enable consultative selling delivered 3X the conversions of its call center. And because Multicenter’s live agents provide customers with a personalized shopping experience on WhatsApp, the brand also reported an 85% customer satisfaction rate.

During busy sales periods, Multicenter agents can manage upwards of six WhatsApp conversations at once, which decreases average response time from five minutes to one minute.

Multicenter has developed campaigns around seasonal events like Black Friday, Oktoberfest, and special sales called “Open House” days. Each message comes with a call to action inviting recipients to “say yes” to talk further with an agent.

Maximize your results with consultative selling and make the most of the relationships you build by:

• Building integrations with backend systems like CRM, e-commerce, and contact center systems
• Using the Conversions API so you can apply your own marketing data to optimize ad targeting, decrease cost per action, and measure results across Meta technologies
• Creating custom experiences with WhatsApp Flows to make it easier for customers to take action with your business—such as signaling purchase intent or expressing interest in personalized offers—right within WhatsApp
• Capturing customer data that can be leveraged for future personalized upsell and cross-sell recommendations

WhatsApp for Business can help you achieve your goals across many strategic use cases—not just driving growth for high-consideration products and services that call for a consultative shopping experience. For holidays and Mega Sales Days, Business Messaging can help with goals from scaling more personalized promotions to optimizing abandoned shopping cart recovery.

To learn more, explore a wide range of WhatsApp for Business holiday and Mega Sales Day resources here.

Not yet taking advantage of WhatsApp for Business? Take the first step, and be on your way to stronger results and customer relationships during peak periods and every day of the year.