Empowering Sales Teams With Full WhatsApp Visibility, Automation

Q: What business opportunity or market need led to the creation of Coral Messaging? 
A: Major enterprises, including some of the world’s largest enterprises, consistently approached us with a significant challenge: their employees were using personal WhatsApp to communicate with clients, but the companies had no visibility into or ownership of these conversations. WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted so these businesses were blind to crucial interactions. When WhatsApp later developed the necessary underlying functionality to support third-party applications in this manner, we seized the opportunity to found Coral Messaging, building the application layer that provides this essential visibility and functionality.

Q: What do you consider to be the main differential value that Coral Messaging offers compared to other business messaging or CRM platforms that seek to integrate WhatsApp? 
A: Our primary differentiator is our singular focus on sales and client-facing teams, unlike the majority of platforms in the ecosystem that cater to marketing or customer service. The crucial distinction is that we do not require employees to change their behavior or adopt a new interface. They continue to use the native WhatsApp application on their phones for all client communication. Also, our platform operates seamlessly in the background, providing the company with full visibility, analytics, and AI driven automations. 

One of our most impactful features is an AI assistant that acts as a participant within the WhatsApp chat, totally under the employee’s control. This assistant monitors the conversation and sends private, automated reminders to the employee in a separate chat. For example, it can prompt them if they forgot to answer a client's question, helping employees manage a high volume of conversations, remain organized, and enhance the quality of client interactions. 

Q: How has the Mexican market responded to Coral Messaging's value proposition, considering the high adoption of WhatsApp among local businesses? 
A: The response from the Mexican and broader Latin American markets has been exceptionally strong, driven by the near-universal adoption of WhatsApp for business communication in the region. To effectively serve this demand, we have established a local presence in Mexico, as well as in other key markets like Brazil and India, ensuring we understand the specific nuances of each business culture. Our value proposition resonates most in sectors built on high-touch, consultative relationships, including financial services like private banking and wealth management, high-ticket corporate sales, real estate brokerages, and auto sales. 

Q: What are the main technical and operational requirements to start using the platform? 
A: The initial requirements are minimal, allowing for a rapid start. A company is assigned a dedicated corporate phone number, which represents its AI assistant. An employee can initiate a new client chat with our technology embedded simply by sending a one-word command to this number. For deeper integration, our platform is designed to connect with any Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, allowing companies to automate the creation of Coral-enabled WhatsApp chats directly from their existing workflows. 

Q: How is Coral Messaging integrating AI inside its operations to enhance operations? 
A: AI is not just an enhancement; it is fundamental to our product's core value. By having an AI-powered participant inside every WhatsApp chat, we can unlock capabilities that would otherwise be impossible. This "fly on the wall" can analyze conversations in real time, identify patterns, and provide actionable intelligence. It powers the proactive reminders that help client-facing employees stay on top of their tasks, generates analytics for sales managers, and automates repetitive processes. The ability to perform this analysis directly within the conversational flow is a great use case for AI and is absolutely critical to the value we deliver to our clients.

Q: How does Coral Messaging ensure the privacy and security of its clients' data? 
A: We built our platform with security and privacy as the foundational principles from day one, particularly because we serve industries like financial services where data sensitivity is paramount. Our first layer of security is WhatsApp itself, which is one of the most secure communication platforms available due to its end-to-end encryption. Beyond that, we build our infrastructure on top of gold-standard cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS). Finally, our own security and privacy policies are aligned with their stringent standards, ensuring that we leverage best-in-class tools and practices to protect our clients' data.

Q: What technology trends are transforming business communication? 
A: The most significant trend is undoubtedly AI, especially within messaging-based channels like WhatsApp. Beyond AI, we are observing a fundamental behavioral shift in business communication. While employees have many channels available to talk with clients, we see a massive consolidation of interactions onto WhatsApp, particularly in markets like Latin America. The old adage that "email is dead" is something we see anecdotally every day in our client conversations. Businesses are moving away from traditional channels and centralizing a vast majority of their sales conversations on WhatsApp, a trend that continues to accelerate.

Q: What are the main challenges in increasing adoption of enterprise messaging solutions? 
A: The primary challenge, which our platform directly addresses, has been that WhatsApp was originally built as a consumer product, not for heavy enterprise use. As a result, companies lacked the necessary software to manage, scale, and extract value from these conversations, especially for client-facing and sales use cases. While WhatsApp has had an API since approximately 2018, it was initially designed for marketing and customer service. A turning point is happening right now with the release of new, sales-focused functionality from WhatsApp, which we have built our product on top of. This marks a significant shift, finally providing the tools needed to unlock the full potential of WhatsApp for professional client-facing teams at scale.

Q: What are Coral Messaging's expansion or technological development plans for the Latin American and Mexican market for the next 12 months? 
A: Our immediate plan is to solidify our position as the expert in this new sales-oriented technology and build out the most robust application layer for companies to leverage it. Our team is largely based in Latin America, so we are intensely focused on the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking markets, building features specifically for their needs. While we are a global company with clients in the European Union and the United States, Latin America is our primary focus for development and expansion.

While we are constantly releasing new features, one of the most significant developments on the pipeline is a transformation of our insights dashboard for managers. The dashboard provides a high-level overview of all chat activity. The next version will introduce a salesperson-centric lens, allowing a manager to group all analysis and metrics by individual team members. This will provide much more granular and actionable insights, enabling managers to effectively coach their people based on concrete data from their client conversations.

Coral Messaging is a San Francisco-based software company that, as an official WhatsApp partner, offers enterprise messaging solutions that allow employees to communicate with clients  using their own numbers and the WhatsApp app, improving productivity and sales performance without per-message costs.