After several rumors and clues, Zuckerberg’s company is finally confirming the deployment of the beta version of ‘WhatsApp Business’, the exclusive messaging platform for companies with which WhatsApp seeks to start earning income, as we know, up to date today the courier company does not get a cent of its more than 1.300 million active monthly users, so the time has come to take advantage of them.
As it had already been seen a few weeks ago, WhatsApp was testing an exclusive application for companies, available at the moment only for Android, which would allow companies to contact their customers and make sure they were talking to them (company). Today, new details of this platform have been released and the deployment of the first companies under this first beta has even begun.
WhatsApp will no longer be free … for large corporations
In broad strokes we will have two schemes of this new business service. On the one hand, one dedicated to small businesses or local companies that seek to be in contact with their customers in a simple way. For these, the use of the application and the platform will have no cost, although the tools and information available will be under a basic scheme.
On the other hand, we will have a scheme focused on large corporations, international companies that not only seek to communicate with their customers and users, but also offer tools to confirm purchases, shipments, raise complaints, track services and even make transactions. In this case, the use of the platform will have a monthly cost which has not been specified.
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Matt Idema, director of WhatsApp operations, confirmed that the objective of this strategy is to charge large companies in the future, however they have not yet defined the collection scheme and the final price that this new service will have. In addition, with the passage of time and as the platform matures, artificial intelligence bots and transactions with the same app will be added, much in the style of WeChat.
KLM is the first to upload to WhatsApp Business
For some days, WhatsApp started with a pilot profile verification program to those who after checking their identity are granted a green badge next to the name, which means that the number belongs to a company. Today as part of this program, the first great company within this platform has been announced: the airline KLM.
KLM is one of the first examples of the potential that WhatsApp Business will have, since the same airline has published a video with details of what can be done from the messaging application, which is managed by 250 customer service agents that grant information and help in real time in 10 different languages.
Through the verified profile of KLM on WhatsApp we can confirm our reservation, receive alerts for check-in, information on additional services, updates on the status of the flight and we can even request that you send us our boarding pass, so we can have it on hand at if we have lost it and do not want to use it on paper. All this from the same profile in an automated way, in real time and available 24 hours a day anywhere in the world.
In the next few days new companies with profiles verified in WhatsApp will begin to appear and it will be up to us to contact them in case of any query, since WhatsApp itself has been very clear when mentioning that they do not want this to become a platform that encourages SPAM. Therefore, they emphasize that at any time we can block these companies, which will serve as a report that will help to take action in case of abuse.