Businesses see growth with WhatsApp's business tools

WhatsApp is about three things: simplicity, reliability and security, and that extends to its support for businesses.

"For simplicity we really want it to be dead simple to use. Many people get WhatsApp, it's actually the first app that they get when they buy a new phone for the first time. And so we want to make sure that no one feels intimidated by technology, when they open it up, they understand how to use everything and so that's why when we build stuff we wanted it to feel natural to people," explained Ajit Varma, Director of Product Management at WhatsApp for business products.

Reliability is paramount when a small degradation can affect millions of users who rely on the app for crucial communications and to stay in touch with family and friends, he noted. "We believe that your conversations should be private, and only between...you and the person you're talking to. So it's a very important value for us to be secure as well," he added.

WhatsApp Business is a growing part of the WhatsApp business, resonating with both consumers and businesses of all sizes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, WhatsApp has become the means to create a digital living room where people have control over their private conversations, he explained.

"We're at 2 billion WhatsApp accounts active every month. We have a huge amount of daily actives, there're 15 billion minutes of calls every day and 175 million (communications between businesses and users) every day. And a lot of the things that we do in our application are trying to reproduce that close personal environment. So, everything from like the indicators, to feeling like a live environment, to features that we launched recently like XML messages are all about making sure that it feels very personal and private," he said.

At the same time, WhatsApp Business has an edge over trying to email a business, which may not get a response. WhatsApp's research has shown that 71% of customers expect an immediate response and 73% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, Varma said. 

"Across industries, these conversations help people move from intent to action. The closer you feel to a business, the more likely you are to (buy)."

Businesses across every vertical are investing in WhatsApp to communicate, and receiving questions around intent to buy a product, deciding on the right product, and tracking the delivery of a product, Varma observed. "We're also seeing things that are happening in services - services is one of the biggest areas that's growing on WhatsApp, we actually see a lot of things all the way from real estate agents who are showing off the houses that they have to hair salons booking appointments," he shared.

"A lot of what we design for is how do we make life easy for small businesses, how do we make it so that they can spend their time doing the stuff that they love to do," he said.

The pandemic has jumpstarted commerce over WhatsApp, Varma added. "A lot of businesses were no longer able to see their customers in person, especially small businesses...a lot of small businesses that were actually never focused on going online or having online commerce, but (the pandemic) necessitated that they move over (to WhatsApp). And so we changed a lot of our roadmaps and plans to basically make sure that we address the needs of businesses and consumers around the world in these very difficult times," he said.

"We are helping them establish a presence, like I mentioned that a lot of our businesses don't have websites and they don't have online presences today. And they don't want to spend the cost and the money to do that so we offer a free profile, where they can basically upload an image of themselves and talk about (their business)."

Other business tools include WhatsApp Business, which allows businesses to register for their own chat account similar to an individual who gets a chat account on the consumer version of WhatsApp. "It's all free to download and then they can immediately start talking to their customers," Varma said.

To go further, WhatsApp has APIs to connect to partners, and is also integrated with the rest of Facebook. This allows advertising on other Facebook platforms where customers can contact the business via WhatsApp. "This is really popular in emerging markets, and in Asia in particular, in Vietnam and Thailand, we've seen a lot of engagement with messaging formats, where users are very comfortable with conversational commerce and this allows them to do things," Varma commented.

Shops is an online shopping platform that works across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, so now merchants can chat with customers over WhatsApp about the products within Shops.

"We also have a simple solution that we launched earlier this year called Catalog, which allows merchants to upload all the items that they sell. And it could be everything from services to restaurants to real estate and the users can browse this catalogue," Varma said.

WhatsApp is also making the journey towards a sale as easy as possible, a focus that will continue into 2021, he added. Small touches include shopping carts, automatic replies for businesses and quick replies for frequently-asked questions, as well as the AdWords a prospective customer was looking at before an enquiry was received over WhatsApp.

QR codes were recently launched to bridge the offline-to-online gap. These are placed offline, and when scanned, instantly bring the user into a WhatsApp conversation with a business, Varma said. "It just makes it much simpler to start a conversation without having to go through all the steps - stuff like add (the business) to your address book, which also has some privacy implications. So again, it's a big focus on, on bridging online, offline and simplicity."

Varma also shared some recent case studies, including an Indonesian maker of handcrafted watches, Matoa, which began using the WhatsApp Business app to communicate with customers. "They found that 80% of all customer engagement took place in the app and 20% of the customer interactions via WhatsApp resulted in sales," he said.

Another satisfied customer is Cigna in Hong Kong, which used a WhatsApp chatbot built together with Clare.AI to help increase customer satisfaction. The bot was thrice as fast in resolving customer queries; agent handling time was reduced 33% as well as the bot handled frequently-asked questions, freeing the agents to handle other issues. Almost all queries (91%) were resolved.