The success of a business heavily relies on its efforts to promote its brand name, products, and services.
Businesses have to keep up with the latest social media marketing trends and ensure they take notice of the latest changes in Google’s search algorithm, in order to draw more visitors to their online properties.
But they also have to provide customer support to those visitors who were converted into leads or customers. And offer support for people who are interested in becoming a customer of the particular business.
The majority of the worldwide population has a Facebook account in the modern day. But major social networks are also observing a steady increase in their user base.
Business owners should know that people prefer to contact their brand or company and they expect this process to be hassle-free.
That is, they don’t want to send an email every now and then, or leave a message on the company’s Facebook page!
According to Expanded Ramblings, there are more than 1.5 billion active users on WhatsApp. As much as 70% of all WhatsApp users make use of this application one time each day.
WhatsApp accounts for more than 100 million calls per day. It also accounts for 55 million video calls on a daily basis.
And when it comes to messages – over 60 billion messages on a daily basis! WhatsApp has grown into the most popular messaging application on modern smartphones.
Most people who own a smartphone now rely primarily on WhatsApp to send messages to their friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, as well as to make calls and video calls easily.
The WhatsApp Business App – What This App Means For Your Business?
On the 18th of January 2018, WhatsApp published a post on their blog that announced the release of their brand-new WhatsApp Business application.
The post explained how WhatsApp has decided to provide a separate application that is mostly focused on small businesses.
For they required an easier way to offer customer support to their clients. Also to individuals who are interested in signing up for their services or buying products from these small businesses.
The post also explains that recent studies proved that more-and-more businesses are starting to use WhatsApp to communicate with their clients.
But mixing personal messages and business messages is a potential problem!
With this new application launched to businesses around the world, there is no longer a need for mixing these messages.
Personal messages will remain in the user’s standard WhatsApp application, while business-related messages will be present in the new WhatsApp Business application.
With this news release from WhatsApp, many businesses are thinking about making the switch to this new app.
The big question is, what can a business gain from utilizing this application compared to continuing to use the standard WhatsApp application that most people know about?
Features of the WhatsApp Business App
Let’s take a look at some of the new features offered by the WhatsApp Business app. This will give business owners a better idea of what the launch of this apps means for their respective businesses.
- As mentioned previously, the most obvious benefit that businesses can now gain from using the WhatsApp Business app instead is the fact that they are able to separate their personal and business-related messages. This will significantly reduce the risk of accidentally sharing something personal with a business contact, which may place a particular business in a negative spotlight.
- The application is available for free, similar to the original WhatsApp app. This is beneficial, as there are some messaging applications with similar features to this new application that can be costly.
- The WhatsApp Business app offers numerous features that the regular version of this messaging application does not for businesses. These tools present a more professional way of communicating with customers. But still allowing them to talk to a real person, should they have questions or comments about a particular business.
- The new Business Profile feature offered by this app allows a business to share essential information about their business with potential customers. This includes a description of the business, a website link, links to social profiles, an address to a physical store, as well as an email address.
- A variety of smart tools are available to businesses in this version of WhatsApp. These smart tools provide features, such as custom quick replies. This can be used to provide fast answers to customer questions when the user of the WhatsApp Business app is not available. There are other useful tools that can automate a part of the messaging process.
- A new statistics feature provides details regarding the business’s customers. These features include details about how many of the sent messages were actually read.
- Business owners who use the WhatsApp Business App can also sign in to WhatsApp Web with their business details and start using all of these convenient features on their computer. This is excellent for individuals choosing to provide assistance over a computer or laptop instead of their smartphone.
- Account profiles for users of the WhatsApp Business App also now state that the account type is a “Business Account”. WhatsApp will soon implement a “Confirmed Account” feature as well. All of these factors offer more authenticity to the business’s profile on WhatsApp.
Making The Most Out Of The WhatsApp Business App
Let’s take a look at how you can make the most out of this new application to help your business improve its efficiency in delivering customer service and support over a mobile messaging platform.
The first and most obvious step would be to go and download the WhatsApp Business App to your Android smartphone.
The application is relatively small to download and it is very easy to get started. After downloading, be sure to begin by setting up an account for your business.
After registering on the WhatsApp Business App, you will need to complete your Business Profile.
It is essential to complete all the fields in this section to ensure your customers are able to quickly find important details about your business.
Here is a look at the important fields that you should ensure you fill out in the Business Profile section:
- About
- Website
- Business Category
- Business Address
- Operating Hours
Once you have filled out the business profile section, the next step is to set up some quick reply messages. These are automated messages that are sent to the customer with your input.
These automated messages are sent based on questions asked by the customer. You can also set up messages such as promotions and coupon codes, as well as messages, like “order received” and “order shipped”.
This will allow you to send a long message with the click of a single button.
Statistics Provided by the App
While using the WhatsApp Business App, be sure to frequently take a look at your messaging statistics. These statistics provide you with the following information:
- Messages you successfully sent to a recipient.
- Messages successfully delivered to a recipient.
- If the recipient read your message or not.
This will help you determine how much of your effort on the messaging app is going to waste. Also, you’ll see how efficient you are in your customer service efforts on WhatsApp!
Conclusion
Businesses should not only focus on providing quality content for their website visitors or relative content in their social media marketing strategy
Indeed, they should also offer great products or services to their customers. But they should also think about those people who may have questions, requests, comments or complaints about the brand.
With the launch of the WhatsApp Business application, businesses now have the opportunity to better communicate with their customers.
This will also ensure that important information is provided to the customers related to the business. This includes links to its website and social media accounts, operating hours and more.
In this post, we discussed how the launch of this new mobile application can affect your customer service.
And how you can make the most out of this brand new app, offered by the most popular messaging application available on smartphones.
