Manage contacts with a built-in WhatsApp CRM.

What a WhatsApp CRM is

A WhatsApp CRM is contact management that lives where the conversation happens. Each contact carries their attributes, tags, lead stage and complete message history, so the person answering can see who they are talking to without opening another system.

It differs from a general CRM in what it is organised around. A traditional CRM is built around deals and pipeline stages, updated by a salesperson after the fact. A WhatsApp CRM is built around the thread, and it updates itself as the conversation happens. For businesses whose sales and support genuinely run on WhatsApp, that is the difference between a record that is current and one that is somebody's Friday admin task.

What you can store against a contact

• Custom attributes. Whatever your business actually needs on a contact: city, plan, order value, admission year, policy number.
• Tags. Lightweight labels for grouping, applied by hand or by automation.
• Lead stage. Where this person sits in your funnel, so the inbox can prioritise and campaigns can segment.
• Full conversation history. Every message with this contact across every agent, on one thread.
• Opt-in and opt-out state. Tracked, and enforced automatically on every campaign.

Getting contacts in and out

Bulk import by CSV, with the columns mapped to your attributes. Contacts also arrive automatically from inbound conversations, from your connected systems, and from Google Sheets where a sheet is the real system of record, which it more often is than anyone admits.

Export works the same way in reverse. Your contact data is yours, and you can take it out in a standard format whenever you want. It is worth checking that any platform you evaluate will say that plainly.

Segmentation that earns its keep

Any combination of tags, attributes and lead stage defines a segment, and a segment is what a broadcast sends to. In practice the segments that make money are unglamorous: bought in the last ninety days, replied but never converted, cart abandoned this week, renewal due next month, one city, one product line.

The discipline is sending to the segment rather than the list. A smaller, better-chosen audience protects your quality rating, costs less per campaign, and converts better. Every broadcast to everyone is a small withdrawal from your number's health.

Connecting the systems you already run

A CRM that does not know about your orders is a contact list with extra steps. Weflux connects through inbound and outbound webhooks and a REST API, so order, payment and fulfilment events from your store or backend can update contacts, move stages and start flows. Google Sheets is supported directly. See the API documentation for the specifics.

Data protection and deletion

Contact data is customer personal data, and it is treated that way. Access is role-based, data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and deletion requests can be honoured for individual contacts or the whole workspace. The security page covers the controls, and data deletion explains the process.

Tags or attributes: which to use

Both label a contact and people use them interchangeably, then wonder why segmentation gets unwieldy. The distinction that holds up:

An attribute is a field with a value. City is Bengaluru. Plan is Pro. Order count is four. There is one answer, it can change, and you often want to compare it (order count above three, renewal date this month).

A tag is a flag that is either present or not. Attended the webinar. Requested a demo. VIP. A contact can carry many, and you rarely compare them, you just filter on presence.

The failure mode is putting values into tags: tags named "city-bengaluru", "city-mumbai", "city-pune" and so on. It works for a while, then you have four hundred tags and no way to ask "everyone outside Karnataka". If a label has a value, make it an attribute.

Lead stages in practice

A lead stage is where someone sits in your funnel, and it drives both inbox priority and campaign segmentation. Two things make stages useful rather than decorative.

Keep them few. Five or six stages that everyone applies the same way beat fifteen that each person interprets differently. If your team hesitates about which stage something is in, you have too many.

Make them move by themselves where you can. A stage that depends on someone remembering to update it after a call is a stage that is wrong by Thursday. Automations can advance a stage on a reply, a button tap, or an order webhook from your store, which is how the record stays current without anyone doing admin.

Keeping contact data clean

Contact quality is what determines your delivery rate, your cost per campaign and eventually your quality rating. Some of this is unglamorous maintenance:

• Store numbers in full international format. The most common import failure is a spreadsheet of ten-digit numbers with no country code.
• Do not import numbers you cannot account for. If nobody can say where a list came from, it is not a list, it is a liability.
• Prune non-deliverables. Numbers that fail repeatedly are cost with no upside, and they drag your campaign statistics into fiction.
• Record how consent was obtained. An attribute holding the source and date turns "we think they opted in" into something you can actually stand behind.
• Deduplicate on the phone number. The same person imported three times gets your message three times, and then blocks you once.

How a conversation becomes a record

The reason a WhatsApp CRM stays current is that it is fed by the thing your team already does all day. An inbound message creates or matches a contact. An agent applies a tag while replying. A flow advances the stage when a button is tapped. An order webhook writes the order value. Nobody sits down to update the CRM, because updating it is a side effect of the work.

That is also its limit, and worth saying plainly. If a meaningful part of your sales happens on calls or email, those interactions will not appear here. In that case keep your main CRM as the system of record and connect the two, so the WhatsApp history flows into it rather than living in a second place nobody checks.

WhatsApp CRM or a general CRM?

They solve overlapping problems and the right answer depends on where your customer conversations actually happen.

The short version: if your customers reach you on WhatsApp and your team answers there all day, a WhatsApp CRM keeps itself current and a general CRM will always lag behind what was actually said. If you run a considered outbound sale across calls, email and meetings, keep your CRM as the system of record and connect Weflux to it, so conversation history flows in rather than forming a second unchecked source of truth.

Running both without connecting them is the outcome to avoid. Two half-current records is worse than either one alone, because now nobody trusts the answer.

Related

• Shared team inbox where these contact records are used
• Broadcasts for sending to a segment
• Automations for keeping tags and stages current
• API and webhooks for syncing with your own systems