San Francisco, Sep 20 (IANS): Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced a partnership with software company Salesforce where companies on their platform can use WhatsApp business messages to answer customer questions, run marketing campaigns and sell directly in chat.

"More and more people prefer to communicate with businesses over text. That's why we launched our Cloud API earlier this year and are now partnering with Salesforce," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

The new integration will help businesses build experiences to chat with customers on WhatsApp, while being able to manage communication directly from the Salesforce platform.

"We want more people to benefit from faster, richer interactions, and we continue to invest in ways to make it quick and easy for businesses to get up and running on WhatsApp," said Matthew Idema, VP of Business Messaging at Meta.

By partnering with Salesforce, the world's largest customer relationship management (CRM) platform, many more businesses will be able to use WhatsApp to connect with their customers seamlessly, said the company.

"For example, as a part of the pilot for the integration, L'Oreal group brands will use WhatsApp to reconnect with consumers who had previously left items in a shopping cart and will send them coupons and offers, right on the chat thread," the company said.

In a bid to further boost Meta-WhatApp business integration, Zuckerberg in May announced to open the mobile messaging platform to businesses of all sizes globally with WhatsApp Cloud API (application programming interface) hosted by the parent company.

With this move, any business or developer can easily access the service, build directly on top of WhatsApp to customise their experience and speed up their response time to customers by using the secure WhatsApp Cloud API.

The company will offer businesses on WhatsApp free, secure cloud hosting services provided by Meta.