In an environment where immediacy and personalization are key to customer retention, WhatsApp has established itself as the preferred channel for business communications. On the Awtana Amplify podcast, Mateo de los Ríos, conversational automation specialist at Treble, shared his perspective on how companies can move past the informality of personal WhatsApp and professionalize conversations using the WhatsApp Business API and artificial intelligence (AI). Alongside the Awtana hosts, they addressed the channel's evolution, its challenges, and its impact on traceability, efficiency, and customer experience.
WhatsApp in Business: From Informal Use to Conversational Strategy
WhatsApp has evolved significantly in recent years, shifting from an informal messaging tool between friends and family to a key channel for business communications. This transformation has been driven by consumer behavior: customers expect immediate responses, personalized experiences, and seamless communication from their mobile devices.
However, many organizations continue to manage conversations manually and haphazardly, relying on personal accounts or standard WhatsApp Business. While this practice may seem sufficient in the early stages of a business, it becomes a bottleneck as operations scale.
As Mateo, one of the guests on the Awtana Amplify episode, explained, these basic versions of WhatsApp have significant limitations:
- Lack of automation: It is not possible to create automated response workflows or categorize conversations based on content or urgency.
- No integration with core systems: It cannot be easily connected to platforms such as a CRM, preventing the centralization of customer data.
- Poor traceability: Lacking a shared history across teams or performance reporting makes it difficult to measure support efficiency and service quality.
- Limited user management: Only one person can manage the phone number, complicating teamwork and scalability.
These challenges create disconnects across sales, marketing, and customer service teams, leading to duplicated responses, lost opportunities, and an inconsistent experience for the end user.
Therefore, transitioning from informal use to a professional conversational strategy with WhatsApp API, automated workflows, and integrations with tools such as HubSpot or Salesforce has become a top priority for companies seeking to scale, deliver a superior customer experience, and professionalize their digital channels.
WhatsApp Business APIA successful Customer Success team does not wait for a client to experience an issue: it designs the entire post-purchase journey. This proactivity drives higher satisfaction, retention, and expansion opportunities. The customer journey must shift from being improvised to becoming a planned, personalized, and measurable experience. To achieve this, teams must focus on:
This approach not only enhances the customer experience, but also enables internal teams to operate with greater alignment, focus, and efficiency. Proper journey design is the first step toward turning customers into advocates. WhatsApp Business API, on the other hand, enables unifying conversations within a verified channel, automating responses, integrating with tools such as HubSpot, and centralizing data. This transforms the channel into a powerful tool for marketing, sales, and customer service. Traceability as a Driver of Efficiency |
One of the main benefits of this evolution is traceability. Having access to the complete customer conversation history enables all teams—from pre-sales to post-sales—to deliver a consistent, efficient experience. Professionalizing the channel eliminates handoffs between different numbers or disconnected agents and enables smoother support. “Sharing information does not weaken; it strengthens. Transparency is key to growth,” the Awtana team noted during the conversation.
Purposeful Automation: AI, Personalization, and Scalability
Artificial intelligence has revolutionized how businesses respond to their customers, delivering speed and 24/7 availability. However, as Mateo highlighted, the real challenge is not merely responding quickly, but maintaining personalization across every interaction. Automating without factoring in customer context can lead to cold, impersonal experiences that alienate rather than engage.
Leading brands such as Nike and Rappi exemplify how to combine automation with relevance. These companies personalize their messaging by leveraging interaction history, purchasing habits, and behavioral data, allowing them to create more human communications even when powered by automated systems. The key lies in understanding the user and anticipating their needs.
In this context, platforms like Treble offer advanced solutions to build intelligent decision trees, where AI responds based on a structured knowledge base. If the system detects that it cannot satisfactorily resolve an inquiry, it automatically escalates the conversation to a human agent, who receives the full prior context of the interaction. This ensures a seamless, personalized, and highly efficient experience without losing the human touch.
Conclusion:
Professionalizing conversations on WhatsApp is not just an operational improvement; it is a strategic shift that directly impacts how companies engage with their customers and organize internal processes. By shifting from manual, informal usage to a structured conversational strategy, businesses can not only deliver more agile and consistent customer support, but also optimize workflows, shorten response times, and strengthen brand perception.
Thanks to artificial intelligence and tools like the WhatsApp Business API, organizations can now automate processes, design intelligent workflows, centralize interactions within the CRM, and collect valuable data on customer behavior. This enables data-driven decision-making, identifies areas for improvement, and scales operations efficiently—without compromising personalization or human warmth.
As Mateo de los Ríos emphasized, the real challenge is not technological, but cultural: a mindset shift is required to adopt these tools with a forward-looking vision. Only then can companies modernize their operations, elevate the customer experience, and build lasting, human, and scalable relationships over time.
