WhatsApp, owned by Meta, is now offering a new cloud-based API to allow businesses to adopt the messaging app and use it to communicate with its customers.
Picture: WhatsApp.
To optimize the commercial experience, it is necessary “to meet the public where it is already”, defends Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, during the Conversations conference. “More than a billion users log in to our email services every week through a business account,” he said.
“They need help finding the products and services they want, and making purchases, from big-ticket items to everyday products. And today […] we’re opening up WhatsApp to businesses of all sizes, worldwide, with the WhatsApp Cloud API. »
WhatsApp is increasingly open to businesses
For Mark Zuckerberg, the cloud-based platform will allow any business or developer to build a personalized dashboard on top of the WhatsApp software to “personalize their experience and speed up their response time to customers”.
This dashboard will also give businesses an overview of their WhatsApp accounts, current account limits, product news and access to the four main account tools – overviews, messages, templates, phone numbers and product catalog. .
The use of the WhatsApp Cloud API is free for the first 1,000 messages per month, which can be initiated by the business or the user. Then businesses can choose to scale up and expand more broadly through paid tiers, with fees based on the number of customer conversations per day. The cost varies from 1 cent to almost 20 cents, depending on whether the conversations are initiated by companies or users and depending on the market.
The company has been building its business offering since 2017, when it started piloting a dedicated business chat app. The launch of WhatsApp Business for Android followed about six months later.
Source: ZDNet.com