Social messaging apps are now granting businesses the power to remain competitive. Without chats, businesses are bound to lose an enormous amount of exposure. Other than cultivating customer loyalty in the long run, chatting with customers help businesses build real connections and drive sales by transforming conversations into conversions.

Many use chats on a daily basis; in fact, 3.09 billion smartphone owners access messaging apps for communication. As people grow fond of chatting online, they use it not just with families and friends but also with businesses. This is proven when 51% of mobile messaging app users claimed that they prefer contacting brands via mobile messages, as shown in a study by Kenshoo.

All this explains the rising popularity of messaging platforms such as Respond.io, where businesses unify customer communications to ease work operations. Nevertheless, to maximize revenue and minimize expenses, business owners must always explore better WhatsApp Business API options available on the market. If you still don’t know where to start, here’s a Respond.io alternative as your starting point!

Respond.io vs SleekFlow: what we offer as the best WhatsApp Business Solution Provider

Respond.io and SleekFlow have significant similarities in terms of the services and features provided. Although Respond.io looks cheaper at first glance, the features are actually limited.

As opposed to Respond.io, SleekFlow offers an omnichannel platform with comprehensive features, a sufficient number of contacts, flexible add-ons, and more to accelerate sales, boost conversions, and reinforce customer support with seamless workflows.

So, which should you really choose? Read on to find out. 

Free onboarding support for Official WhatsApp Business API

There are over 100 billion messages exchanged on WhatsApp daily. The undying popularity of WhatsApp messages sent to businesses continues to grow daily.

One in every four US adults uses WhatsApp. - Oberlo

This further emphasizes the significance of WhatsApp Business API. SleekFlow has foreseen the need to scale businesses and push sales through WhatsApp, providing clear step-by-step guides, documentation, a help center, videos, and even consultation for the entire application process.

For customers of SleekFlow, special pricing along with free onboarding support are also offered. This means that SleekFlow will guide you through the tedious application process of the WhatsApp Business API via 360dialog, one of the Business Solution Providers (BSP) officially assigned by WhatsApp.

Find out why businesses should integrate WhatsApp Business API here.

Want to apply for it on your own instead? No problem. Check out our guide for applying WhatsApp Business API.

Assigning conversations to multiple users instead of one

Contacts can be assigned to only one agent on Respond.io. On the other hand, SleekFlow users can have up to 5 collaborators aside from the agent owning the chat, ensuring that each customer receives necessary assistance and accurate information as soon as possible as relevant departments or employees can attend to inquiries whenever needed.

Besides that, SleekFlow has incorporated handy little details such as displaying agent names in chats for the ease of customers, scheduling messages right in the reply section, setting your online status to ‘active’, and more.

Extra customer contacts: the more, the better

Having the number of customer contacts restricted to 100 is common for the free plans, but SleekFlow has pushed open doors to assist businesses by allowing 5,000 and 20,000 customer contacts for pro and premium users. As for Respond.io, they supply 1,000 and 3,000 contact slots for the equivalent tiers.

Depending on the size of your business, choosing the appropriate plan is critical to optimizing the budget for a higher ROI. If your company has a larger client base, you should definitely go for a premium solution with extra contacts for highly efficient operations.

More valuable, flexible automation and workflows

As shown on Respond.io’s website, the number of automated rules for their Team plan and the Business plan is 5 and 20 workflows, respectively. As opposed to that, automated rules accessible on SleekFlow are 10 for pro plans and unlimited for premium plans. 

Even a free-forever startup plan on SleekFlow has 5 automation rules.

Find out how to create a WhatsApp chatbot for your business.

Bonus: free comment auto reply feature on Facebook and Instagram

Undoubtedly, social media engagement is important when selling through social media. However, most businesses find it difficult to allocate time to manage these accounts. With the decreasing consumers' patience, they often expect brands to reply to their comments or messages almost immediately.

With SleekFlow's auto reply for comments and messages on Facebook and Instagram, brands no longer have to worry about that. Each customer will feel acknowledged, and the posts will gain a higher reach as the activity helps with the social media algorithm.

Sign up for free on SleekFlow to automate your comment replies and messages on Facebook and Instagram.

Detailed, comprehensive analytics for sales and conversions

On SleekFlow, the analytics dashboard is super organized and demonstrative as it displays the overall sales performance over time. This is a plus point as it is highly constructive for assessing marketing strategies, the efficacy of current workflows, and even the productivity of each salesperson.

On Respond.io, the analytics dashboard is rather limited. Their users can only review the activities of their agents in terms of replying to customers and sending out messages, but most of their reports are components related to the sources, opening, and closing of messages.

SleekFlow analytics contains all those elements, accompanied by other additional metrics such as delivery rate, bounce rate, read rate, and reply rate for the campaigns created. You can even compare two segments at a time!

Monitor the results of your marketing campaigns to further improve them with better retargeting each time.

Since the new payment link feature allows customers to pay right in the chat, businesses can track each deal closed on SleekFlow. This dedicated analytics dashboard can also easily assess each team's performance.

More outstanding integrations to accelerate sales

Available social media channels on Respond.io and SleekFlow include the official WhatsApp Business API, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WeChat, Telegram, LINE, and Viber.

Other integrations offered by Respond.io include Dialogflow, Zapier, and Google Sheets. They also provide the installation of a live chat widget for websites created on WordPress, Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace, which is also conveniently accessible for free on SleekFlow.

The SleekFlow Live Chat even has additional functions such as:

• a variety of social media or messaging channels for customers to choose from (you won't lose the conversation even after they leave your website!)

• real-time tracking to see what page your customers are browsing on your website

• customizable form for lead generation

On top of that, SleekFlow offers extra advantages:

• Native Shopify integration

Draft Shopify orders in chat, apply multiple discounts, and close deals right in the chat with SleekFlow's native Shopify integration. With the mobile app on your phone, you can sell no matter where you are. As e-commerce store owners, you can also view a wide variety of customer information in their profile right next to the chat, including order history, last ordered item, payment status, and more, apart from the existing personal data such as name, email, phone number, birthday, and so forth. After integrating your Shopify store, sending out personalized abandoned cart reminders will also be as easy as just a few clicks.

• Facebook Lead Ads

Integrate your Facebook Lead Ads for free and take control of your highly qualified leads and customer data for effective targeting campaigns.

• Salesforce

Contacts, leads, and opportunities from Salesforce can be synced on SleekFlow so that the customer journey is also clearly displayed right next to the chat box. With the customers' purchase intent available on each of their profiles, the team can manage their inquiries or messages according to different priority levels as labeled.

Jump to this section: the powerful Salesforce integration on SleekFlow

• HubSpot

Similar to the Salesforce integration, SleekFlow users can now sync HubSpot contacts to unify customer data. In 2023, SleekFlow will also roll out more HubSpot features, such as chat history backup and automated WhatsApp messages for HubSpot workflows.

SleekFlow also offers major integrations, including Zapier (which includes Google Sheets), Twilio, and more.

Data security: don't let employees run away with your customers!

Enterprises that have integrated SleekFlow now own the privilege of having contact information masking. In this case, they don’t have to worry about salespersons leaving the company along with the customer contact and bringing them to their competitors. It also guarantees more privacy and safety for its customers by promoting its products and services to the general public.

Pricing: quality over price is always the sustainable choice

At first glance, you'll see that the premium plan on Respond.io is slightly cheaper. However, if you dive deeper into the evaluation of features and try exploring our services, you will realize that SleekFlow actually offers additional detailed functions and stronger customer support. Companies that opt for SleekFlow can even choose to add on user logins as the size of the business grows over time. 

Flexible add-on features customized for your needs

Moreover, SleekFlow has many add-ons for you to choose from according to your business needs. This means you do not have to upgrade the entire plan but instead get the specific functions you need to better manage your budget.

Think about it. For businesses and enterprises to thrive, getting a long-lasting solution worth every cent to present consistently satisfying services to customers is always better. Make success-worthy decisions. Don't get carried away by what seems to be cheap. Your business deserves the premium option with better quality.

Why SleekFlow?

As shown clearly in the comparison above, SleekFlow offers an extensive range of comprehensive features that are practical and highly beneficial for accelerating sales, especially for enterprises and retail businesses.

Known for excellent customer support, SleekFlow users will never have to worry about not having their questions or issues solved. Multi language-speaking representatives are trained to assist you through the simple learning process and complete the tedious steps of the WhatsApp Business API application.

How to use SleekFlow for your business

Enterprises such as Eau Thermale Avène and Bossini have incorporated SleekFlow for their sales-boosting strategies. From retail and e-commerce to beauty salons and more, you can customize your marketing and sales strategy with SleekFlow. Out of the library of advanced features, here are a few main functions that might be useful for retail enterprises.

A centralized platform to facilitate communication

Hundreds of thousands of customer inquiries can be settled with fewer team members on SleekFlow’s all-in-one platform. In the present world, social media users often chat on multiple social media apps at the same time. On SleekFlow, businesses can keep up with the trend and attend to messages coming in from WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and more, all at the same time, with multiple logins for different users.

Salesforce integration to shorten the sales cycle with large clients

As mentioned earlier in this article, SleekFlow provides powerful Salesforce integration for customers to consolidate all customer data and track the buyers' journey across online and offline channels while shortening the sales cycle with efficient customer segmentation.

Hot leads and larger clients can be prioritized, and the various purchasing stage can be shown right next to the customer chat box for quick, accurate support.

Also, as you complete the 2-way sync of Salesforce contacts, leads, and opportunities on SleekFlow, you can customize the settings by editing the specific fields when mapping the contacts between SleekFlow and Salesforce.

Explore how the Salesforce integration on SleekFlow works.

Discover how Bossini, one of the world's leading fashion retailers, increased in-store sales by 18% in an O2O marketing campaign.

Automated, personalized broadcast messages

With more than 2 billion users worldwide, almost everyone has WhatsApp on their phones. Businesses can fully utilize the WhatsApp Business API to send out personalized broadcast messages to connect deeply with customers. Through these meaningful interactions, customers are more likely to trust your brand and contribute higher spending in their purchases. It’s like how we’re more likely to buy products from friends!

See how Eau Thermale Avène managed more than 60,000 new members with a social commerce portal on WhatsApp.

Get paid instantly in the chat

No news of WhatsApp pay arriving in your country? Do it first on SleekFlow.

By integrating with Stripe, a top-notch payment provider with solid security, SleekFlow bridges business owners to the world of social commerce. Upon solving the customer inquiries, your team can generate a payment link directly to get paid in the chat instantly. With SleekFlow, the complete, frictionless shopping experience can be achieved in the chat on any messaging channel your customers prefer.

Unified CRM to convert prospects with accelerated speed to lead

Consumers are now expecting an almost immediate response when they contact a business. If the response time is slow, they will likely give up altogether or make purchases from your competitors instead. Automated responses are useful to reduce the loss of leads and drive conversion as customers are provided with the answers at once. And as we all know, happy customers share their experiences with others. That’s free marketing!

Using SleekFlow has reduced our “drop-offs”, improved the response time, and solved niggling issues with CRM integration.

Jovan Lin

AVP Marketing & Corporate Communications at PSB Academy

Furthermore, CRM integrations allow businesses to properly categorize customers into different categories and automatically assign them to the most appropriate person in charge. With a structured and detailed customer database, even retargeting marketing campaigns can generate more impressive results.

Switch to SleekFlow without losing your WhatsApp Business API number

Many customers have tried platforms similar to SleekFlow without getting the desired results. They have then transferred to SleekFlow with the assistance of our professional team. Be rest assured, as you will not have to lose the existing WhatsApp Business API number. Chat history and customer contacts can be imported as well.

Visit SleekFlow’s YouTube channel or blog posts for more detailed guides.

Get started with SleekFlow today to generate more sales

We understand that businesses need to weigh the pros and cons of every decision made. It is only reasonable to have doubts before starting something new. This is why SleekFlow has a free trial version with no expiration for businesses to explore what’s right for them.

*Note: Respond.io only has a 14-day free trial

From the campaign analytics included, marketers can also see the results generated by using SleekFlow. Experience the convenience and find the best solution for your business.

SleekFlow guarantees a stronger commitment to customers. Features with premium quality will definitely bring forth highly promising results, maximize revenue and increase sales and conversion, no matter for online or brick-to-mortar stores.