The customer inbox is very rarely a quiet place.
Retailers use a range of channels to bombard their customers, whether it’s email promotional offers, SMS delivery updates, or app notifications. And a lot of the time, they convey a level of urgency akin to a medical emergency.
Naturally, given its prominent position as one of the most widely used messaging platforms in the Western world, more and more retailers are adding WhatsApp to their arsenal of customer service engagement tools.
That makes a lot of sense on paper. The app is already on customers’ phones, and supports text, images, video, product cards, and two-way conversation.
Yet it also creates an obvious risk: turning one of the most personal channels a customer uses into another place to ignore brands.
As Kim Johal, Retail Specialist at Infobip, put it:
“We’ve all received those messages; it just becomes a bombardment of spam.”
That is the challenge facing conversational commerce. WhatsApp may offer retailers a more direct route to customers, but a direct route is not the same as permission to interrupt them.
Retail’s Shift Toward Conversation
For years, digital retail has been built around a fairly rigid model. A customer visits a website, searches for a product, fills a cart, perhaps abandons it, then receives a generic message encouraging them to come back.
WhatsApp and other rich messaging channels could make that journey more conversational.
Johal believes the shift is being driven partly by changing customer behavior. While some people will always pick up the phone, more customers now expect to interact with brands through text, images, and real-time updates.
“People are looking to engage with brands through conversation,” Johal said.
For service teams, that can mean answering a delivery question or helping a customer find a store. For retail and marketing teams, it could mean checking stock availability, sharing relevant product options, sending a waitlist invitation, or helping somebody complete a purchase.
Given how ubiquitous WhatsApp is, it means retailers do not need to persuade customers to download another branded app or learn a new service channel. They are already there.
But this is where many brands could get the strategy wrong.
Personalization Cannot Mean More Messages
The temptation will be to treat WhatsApp as a more engaging version of SMS.
That would be a mistake.
Johal argued that generic outreach is already losing its impact. A “Hi, first name, we’ve got an offer on” message may technically be personalized, but it does not show that a brand understands what the customer wants at that moment.
Instead, he described a more useful type of interaction: a customer browsing a particular brand or product category could receive an update when relevant stock arrives, with an option to join a waitlist:
“It’s transforming the overall approach to how brands are now communicating with their customers. Rather than doing a one-to-many approach, it’s a one-to-one approach.”
Useful personalization is based on the customer’s immediate task, preferences, and timing. It is not simply another reason to send a campaign.
Of course, there is a line.
A customer may welcome a stock notification they asked for. They may be less enthusiastic about a retailer using browsing behavior to push an unexpected offer into a private messaging app.
Johal said consent has to sit at the center of that decision. “If a consumer consents to basically having that personalization,” the message is more likely to feel expected. Without that expectation, proactive messaging can create friction and prompt customers to opt out.
