WhatsApp unveils new business tools in social commerce push

Meta announced two major updates for the over 50 million businesses using its messaging app WhatsApp to connect with customers.

On top of introducing new, paid features on its free-to-use WhatsApp Business app, Meta will also open access to businesses and developers looking to build more advanced chat features – such as verified accounts and custom notifications – through APIs.

Photo credit: Meta

The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled the updates on May 19 this year at Conversations, the company’s first global conference on business messaging.

Before the updates, businesses had to engage a third-party provider to build custom solutions on the WhatsApp Business Platform. The newly launched WhatsApp Cloud API uses Meta’s secure hosting infrastructure, which eliminates the cost of server expenses for both the solutions providers and companies that engage them.

New premium features on the WhatsApp Business app, which will become available in a few months, will include custom URL links that can direct users to a business’ WhatsApp presence and the ability to manage chats on up to 10 devices instead of a maximum of four on a free account.

More than a billion users connect with a business account across Meta’s messaging services – Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp – each week. Last year, the volume of daily conversations between people and businesses on Meta’s messaging platforms grew by over 50%.

“We have seen acceleration in the use of messaging between people and businesses. The pandemic certainly boosted that,” Matt Idema, vice president of business messaging at Meta, tells Tech in Asia.

In India and Indonesia, over 80% of online adults message a business at least once a week, with 75% and 79% of respondents saying that they are more likely to make a purchase with a company that they can contact via messaging, respectively. The findings were released as part of a Kantar online survey – commissioned by Meta – of 5,504 adults across 11 countries.

According to Idema, conversational commerce has been shown to increase customer satisfaction, increase employee productivity, and ultimately increase sales for businesses.

For example, since implementing a chatbot using the WhatsApp Business Platform, over 90% of customer inquiries received by Indonesia-based telco Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison are now resolved without live agent support. The telco’s customers can also top up their mobile minutes and purchase data services through WhatsApp chat.

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Digital payments, however, remain a missing piece in Meta’s efforts to expand into social commerce, with embedded payment features on WhatsApp available only in India, Brazil, and the US to date.

WhatsApp’s learnings in India and Brazil will give it the opportunity to bring the payments feature to more places in future, Idema says. He adds: “We don’t have any immediate plans to introduce it in other countries, but it’s definitely part of the experience that we want to build.”