With the announcement on August 1st, businesses are now able to directly connect with their customers via WhatsApp for business. Direct messaging will be free within a time window of 24 hours from a user’s message, after this period it is still possible to send notifications to users, however, it will cost something. Starting 2019 WhatsApp will also allow businesses to display ads on user’s status updates. This opens a new world for sales and marketers.
A brief summary:
- Chatting between businesses and customers via WhatsApp is now possible
- Integration of digital assistants/chatbots is possible (automation to the next level)
- WhatsApp only charges for slow replies that fall out of a 24h window – no problem for a chatbot that replies within seconds 😉
Now let’s dig deeper….
Only four months after Jan Koum (CEO & Founder of WhatsApp) left Facebook due to conflicts with Mark Zuckerberg, that are supposed to be related to privacy and monetization topics, Facebook opens up the WhatsApp API infrastructure for business automation and a first monetization strategy for WhatsApp since its acquisition in 2014. But what does that mean in detail?
What WhatsApp offers you:
- Businesses can now directly chat to their customers on WhatsApp
- Seamlessly integrated into WhatsApp, no additional application necessary
- API provides programmatic infrastructure to talk to customers on an end-to-end encrypted encoding
- Digital assistants/chatbots can now be integrated
- You will only get charged by WhatsApp if the reply takes longer than 24 hours – with a chatbot that should be no problem since it replies within seconds
- GDPR ready – a user needs to show his consent to communicate with a business through WhatsApp
In other words, businesses not only have another possibility to advertise their products and services but also stay in a closed loop with their customers. Customer support services can now easily and fast contact customers for feedback and also the other way around. Customers can contact businesses wherever and whenever they want. That means that also customers will benefit from this integration.
Here are some hard facts to understand the power of this application better:
EASY ACCESS TO 2.8 BILLION USERS – THIS IS GREAT NEWS!
With WhatsApp opening up, businesses are able to reach an additional 1.5 billion monthly active users on top of the 1.3 billion Facebook Messenger users on the Facebook infrastructure ONLY.
That also means reaching new and undiscovered target groups. It opens another door to a +35 years target group, you reach with Instagram, Snapchat and sometimes even with Facebook hardly.
WhatsApp No #1 messenger service in 128 countries:
The number #1 messenger channel in Austria and Germany is being used extensively by its users. Every single day WhatsApp processes 65 billion messages with a market penetration of nearly 90%, measured on the amount of installed applications on smartphones, only in Austrian.
No other communication platform/tool has that many sent messages per day!
At the end of the day you, as a business, will gain the following benefits:
- Messaging is a one-to-one communication channel for your customers
- Easily receive feedback and leverage real-time communication and services with the power of automation services such as chatbots
- Voice and text as a single-interface in WhatsApp (95% of the WhatsApp users make use of text messaging, sending files and 80% of the Users use messaging services for calls)
- People are focused on their smartphones and pay attention to the content that flickers across their screens.
- WhatsApp “Newsletters” have an opening-rate close to 100%
Developers and businesses all around the globe have been eagerly waiting for a possibility to use WhatsApp’s infrastructure officially since the solutions so far walked a fine line in being not compliant with WhatsApp’s terms and conditions. Now the gates are open and you can easily benefit from above said.
What do you need for a WhatsApp integration?
- WhatsApp Framework or WhatsApp chatbot framework if you want an automated chatting software*
- Customer Support team
- Facebook Account / WhatsApp Facebook Account
- Hosting Server (that makes WhatsApp also to a high-secure chat platform. Facebook/Whatsapp doesn’t have any access to your users data)
*We took our TheVentury ChatbotBase Framework to the next level and offer a seamless multi-channel integration with WhatsApp and other messaging services.
If you are interested or have questions, contact us at the form below and we will discuss your personal strategy in a free of charge first consultation to evaluate the potential fields of application for your business.
More information about our Framework can be found here.
Interested in automating your customer interaction through WhatsApp?
We are here to help.
