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The future of customer support is already in your pocket.

Jonas Berggren

Head Of Business Development NE

Core services

customer service,

CX,

Automation,

omnichannel,

Published on Fri Aug 28 2026

Updated on Fri Aug 28 2026

4 minute read

Asynchronous customer support using messaging services has been around for over a decade now, but there are some markets where these apps are only just starting to take off. You might be surprised by some of the places where they are now used by most customers on a daily basis. The most popular messaging app across Europe and the US is WhatsApp. There are others out there, such as Telegram, Signal, and Viber, and China has their own entirely different ecosystem with apps such as WeChat and QQ.

Clearly there is a big advantage if brands can offer a contact option on WhatsApp - compared to a traditional chat option - because the customer can send a message and then put their phone in their pocket. It will ping a notification when there is a reply, rather than forcing the user to sit with a chat window open waiting for the agent to respond.

WhatsApp manages over a million messages every second. That’s about 100 billion messages daily. Although most of them are personal conversations, several billion of these daily messages are between a customer and a company. In Brazil and India, this type of communication with a company using WhatsApp is now the primary service channel. It’s how customers want to interact. 82% of Brazilians use WhatsApp to communicate with companies and 60% have purchased something from a company using the app. Around 70% of all companies in Brazil use WhatsApp to support customers - and also to sell to them. You can find Harvard Business Review studies from a decade ago already documenting how customer contact changed in these markets.

In Europe and the US the picture is quite different. It feels almost innovative to see a small business in London offering support via WhatsApp. In the US, there was consumer inertia created by most consumers having unlimited SMS messages on their phone plan - there was a reluctance to move to new messaging services. Markets like India and Brazil faced the opposite dynamic, where phone companies offered free data when used on WhatsApp, but often still charged for SMS. They leapfrogged the places that stuck primarily with SMS. I believe that asynchronous messaging apps like WhatsApp will become a much more important tool for every manager planning how to support customers in the near future. Let’s explore some of the key reasons why:

Convenience. Calling a voice number or clicking on a chat option ties up the consumer. They have to wait to be answered. They have to talk to an agent about their problem. They need to remain on the call or chat until the issue is resolved. Resolving problems via messaging allows the customer to send a message and then drive to work - checking for a reply when they arrive. Most customer problems can be resolved this way - everything except the urgent issues that must-be-fixed-right-now!
New types of interactions. WhatsApp is not just a replacement for text SMS. You can send photos, video, audio clips. You can answer a poll, send a document, or even your live location. Imagine the opportunities this creates for customer support. The customer has a problem with their new washing machine or internet router and sends a photo or video along with their question. Suddenly, you have entirely new support dimensions available.

Take the lead with tomorrow's CX.

The future of customer support is already in your pocket.

Jonas Berggren

Created at Fri Aug 28 2026

4 min read

The future of customer support is already in your pocket.

It is always available. This is extremely powerful. The customer doesn’t need to make a call, find a number, or leave the website or app they are using. Click a button, and you can immediately send a WhatsApp message to the brand. Your phone is always in your pocket, which means that access to all the companies you need to interact with is always with you, too.

Scale is available. Individual entrepreneurs can just use the WhatsApp Business App, but they can scale up to the API which then supports message routing through various tiers - up to an unlimited number of customers. You can add automated answering, AI agents, human support. The system is flexible and scales from a one-person company to a national utility serving millions.

Sales and payment. Once customers are engaging via messaging, it becomes much easier to convert ongoing conversations into sales opportunities. Click-to-WhatsApp ads can be used on social media to drive conversational engagement that directly leads to sales within the app.

I believe that as we see more payment options emerging, there will be even more opportunities for the increased use of messaging services like WhatsApp. Look at Wero in Europe, PIX in Brazil, and UPI in India. Our wallets have already vanished, but soon in-app payments will be as simple as in-app communication. All the advantages I have outlined above are important, but the markets where asynchronous messaging has been established for longer also show remarkable creativity and innovation. Messaging has often been seen as little more than SMS in highly-developed markets, but Brazil and India have clearly proven that this view is outdated.

Imagine visiting your doctor, receiving your prescription via WhatsApp, which you can forward to a pharmacy on WhatsApp so they deliver the medicine directly to your home within minutes. Or having the ability to talk using live video to a pediatrician when your child is sick without needing specialist software or systems. Using WhatsApp like this is already just accepted as normal in these markets. These are platforms that are convenient and easily available for consumers, they are low-cost for the businesses who use them because most of the infrastructure already exists, and the messages are secure - point-to-point encryption is standard on services like WhatsApp.

The real lesson from markets like Brazil and India is that WhatsApp is not just another customer service channel or messaging platform. It is an entirely different model of customer interaction. It allows conversations to happen in the rhythm of the customer, with photos, video, documents, payments, AI, and human support all inside the same familiar app. Brand interactions take place alongside messages from friends and family. For companies still treating messaging as a less important add-on to voice, email, or web chat, the warning is clear - customers have already moved on. The brands that understand asynchronous support will not just answer questions faster - they will become easier to buy from, easier to trust, and easier to interact with.

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The future of customer support is already in your pocket.

Take the lead with tomorrow's CX.

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