Shared phone numbers for clienteling at a country level

Clienteling is moving from one dedicated phone number per store to shared numbers for stores. A single phone number that off stores for a retailer in a specific country (or region) uses to message customers. This page explains what's changing, why it's better for your business, and what you'll see in Omnichannel Manager and Associate App.

Early Access

If you'd like to pilot this feature with shared phone numbers early in staging or production, reach out to your point of contact at NewStore. For example, you can put a group of stores on a single country phone nymber to test the feature out.  

Important

This feature is available in Associate App from v1.80.0. You may onboard stores to shared phone numbers via Omnichannel Manager, but cannot use the app UI if you are on versions earlier than v1.80.0.

What has changed

Previously before Associate App v1.80.0, every store you onboarded to clienteling got its own dedicated phone number. With shared numbers, multiple stores share a single phone number instead. The shared phone number is used across a country.

Each store still keeps its own private conversations with customers, only the number being used underneath the conversation layer in the app is shared.

Your existing dedicated phone number setup continues to work. Shared numbers are an additional option, available first to early adopters.

The problem this solves

WhatsApp limits how many phone numbers a business can register. This limit made it impossible to allow every store to engage in clienteling conversations with a dedicated store-based phone number. For retailers with more than 20 stores, this became a real constraint.

What this means for you as a retailer

• Brand consolidation. For each country, your shoppers chat confidently with a single phone number. Globally, you need to monitor fewer phone numbers and train associates on.

• Faster onboarding. When a country has a shared number, adding another store there is essentially a one-click action. This helps skip the manual provision of a new phone number for countries that do not support self-service due to laws or regulations.

• Same personalization and confidentiality. Customers still talk to a specific store, and a store can only view its own conversations.

• WhatsApp at scale. You're no longer blocked by a 20 phone number limit, so every store can use WhatsApp.

• Easier international reach. Using WhatsApp is a more reliable channel to message customers in other countries.

• One number for both channels. The same shared phone number works for both SMS and WhatsApp.

How conversations stay separate

We understand the importance to keep conversation confidential at a store level.

When messaging using a shared phone number, NewStore keeps each store's chat with a customer as its own conversation behind the scenes.

With shared phone numbers, we introduced the concept of an active conversation:

• Active conversation: The conversation currently handling the customer's incoming messages. Exactly one is active per customer at a time.

• Idle conversation: A conversation that isn't currently receiving messages. It keeps its own full history and can become active.

When an associate from a different store messages the customer, that store's conversation becomes active and the previous one goes idle, which is called a takeover.

Note

A takeover never moves or merges messages. Each store keeps its own conversation history intact.

Around 95% of conversations are between a single store and a single customer, as reported by NewStore platform data. Conversation takeover ensures that conversation with multiple stores are handled appropriately.

Changes

What's new in Omnichannel Manager

Two areas of the Clienteling Stores pages have changed, the Stores table and the Onboard a Store flow. See .

Clienteling stores table

The stores table now includes two new columns:

• Number Type - Displays if a store is on a shared Country number or a Dedicated number.

• Country - The country the store's phone number belongs to, so you can see at a glance which stores share a number.

Stores on a shared country number display the same SMS and WhatsApp number, while dedicated stores keep their individual numbers.

Minor changes include:

• The Call Forwarding column is now displayed in the right hand of the table.

• Enable WhatsApp button is. now moved into the WhatsApp Number column, instead of the Enabled Channels column.  

Onboarding flow

When you onboard a store, you now choose a Number type:

• Country — One number shared across multiple stores, instant and simplified onboarding, with store-level confidentiality preserved.

• Dedicated — A dedicated number for that store alone.

When onboarding a store on a shared country-level phone number, you can use a new phone number, or upgrade a dedicated phone number already in use by another store.

Updating the WhatsApp Profile

There may be a specific use case when you are upgrading a dedicated phone number to a shared country-level phone number and this phone number has WhatsApp already enabled.

In such cases, you may want to log into your `eta Business Suite → WhatsApp → Account tools → Phone Numbers → Profile and update the information to match the newly country-level phone number and profile. This includes the mandatory fields like display name, profile picture, website URL.

What's different in Associate App

Available from Associate App v1.80.0

With Associate App v1.80, the app now displays a banner inside a customer conversation, indicating which store the customer is currently active with.

Since a customer can only actively chat with one store at a time, conversation takeover across stores can still happen. However, associates now get clear, in-app feedback when a customer's active conversation belongs to a different store, rather than this happening silently in the background.

What's different for your customer or shopper

In the event of a Shopper or customer chatting with multiple stores, the Shopper will see a single conversation on their device, preserving the entire historical flow of messages. Stores will be able to access only the portion of that conversation that have taken place with them.  

Important

Currently, if a customer, who has chatted with more than one store, wants to chat with the previous store (namely, the idle conversation), an associate in the previous store has to do a takeover of the conversation.

This may require cross-store coordination in between your associates, outside of Associate App

What happens to a dedicated phone number

• Dedicated numbers aren't deprecated. If a store needs its own number, that option always stays available.

• Existing stores. Stores already live on dedicated numbers keep working as usual.

Important

Migrating existing stores from a dedicated phone number to a shared number is not available as a feature currently.