Companies are doing their very best to connect with their target group. In terms of communication, they implement more and more fast and useful communication tools their target group uses. WhatsApp responded to this trend and introduced WhatsApp Business. Is your company going to use this tool in the future?
What is WhatsApp Business?
WhatsApp Business is a free tool companies can use to get in contact and help their target group in an approachable way. WhatsApp Business can be used by either small business as an Android app and by larger companies as an API. To use WhatsApp Business, you got to have a phone number that hasn’t been used for WhatsApp before. You can also use landlines, 1800, or toll-free numbers.
Why WhatsApp Business?
We’ve all known WhatsApp for a little while now, but WhatsApp Business adds several extra features, focused on businesses. This way, a customer can quickly get in contact with your company. This is not only useful for your customer service, but your reservations, bookings, and (flight)tickets can be easily shared too. Besides that, you can also add essential company details, so your (new) customers immediately see your company’s location, description, email address, and a link to your website.
WhatsApp Business lets you improve and speed up your service by automated response. This way, you can let your customers know when you’re available to chat, so your contact knows when he can expect an answer. With WhatsApp Business, you can easily manage and organize your chats. Give each conversation a clear label, so you know which chats are with new clients and which are with existing ones. Finally, WhatsApp Business gives you insights in the amount of sent and viewed messages. We hope to see more statistics like average response time in the future too.
WhatsApp Business vs. other platforms
Research of Statista shows that WhatsApp is the most popular messenger app worldwide1. With 1,5 billion active users every month, it’s even more popular than Facebook Messenger and the Chinese WeChat. This means it’s vital for a company to be visible on WhatsApp too, so leads and customers can easily and quickly ask you questions. Still not convinced? Then know that the open rate of WhatsApp is above 90%, while the open rate of for example mail is just around 20%2. This is why WhatsApp is the perfect platform for sending newsletters or other information too.
Case
I can hear you thinking, ‘how can I use this most efficiently?’. That’s why we would like to give you a few examples. At Sterc, we use WhatsApp Business as an expansion of our customer service. But you can use WhatsApp Business to provide answers to questions about bookings too, as we implemented on the website of VVV Texel. The most popular way to use WhatsApp is by implementing social share via WhatsApp, so your website, blog posts, or specific landing pages can easily be shared on WhatsApp.
