What is WhatsApp Business?
WhatsApp Business benefits: Who is the business tool suitable for?
WhatsApp Business is a small tool for the popular chat application for companies to provide easy interaction with customers. The application offers functions such as creating a product catalog, auto-reply and checking message statistics.
Released in January 2018, WhatsApp Business is primarily a solution for small businesses. With WhatsApp Business, customers can easily and directly contact the company. From the point of view of companies, the application is a tool that allows to organize customer communications, track sales and payments.
WhatsApp Business benefits: Who is the business tool suitable for?
The app is aimed at entrepreneurs who want to separate their company profile from their private WhatsApp profile. With a business profile, you can identify your company with information such as location, description, opening hours, email, and website. When you verify the phone number, your account will also receive a green tick.
WhatsApp Business features
Besides creating a company profile, WhatsApp Business offers a number of other functions that distinguish it from the standard messaging tool.
Automatic messages
Company officers or employees may not be able to personally respond to every message at any time of the day. That’s why WhatsApp Business offers several options to automatically respond to customer messages. For example, you can prepare automatic greeting messages. The first time a customer writes to your company or writes again without action for 14 days, they can send an automated message.
The second option is automatic out-of-office messages. In other words, you can prepare an automatic response to messages you receive outside of working hours. This function is disabled during working hours. Also out of office messages can be set for a fixed time.
Quick answers
WhatsApp Business offers the ability to write canned quick replies that you can use with a keyword. For this, it is necessary to type “slash” that is “/” and the corresponding keyword on the keyboard.
Message statistics
The enterprise version of WhatsApp has an overview dashboard with message statistics. From here you can check how many messages have been sent, forwarded, read and received.
Shopping cart
At the end of 2020, the shopping cart functionality came to WhatsApp. This makes it easy for companies and consumers to buy things through the app. Although it has not been launched in Turkey yet, this feature allows ordering and paying for multiple products through a WhatsApp store. While it’s easier for sellers to track orders, the only requirement to use the feature is to create a product catalog that buyers can see. For WhatsApp Business accounts with Shopping turned on, a shopping cart symbol appears in the profile.
chat tag
Classifying chats with customers also gets easier with WhatsApp Business. By assigning different colored labels, you can understand who is talking to whom without looking at the messages. WhatsApp Business provides five preset stickers, but the number can be increased upon request.
Limitations of WhatsApp Business
There are no restrictions on WhatsApp Business compared to the standard version. This means that the app is compatible with WhatsApp Web, contacts can be blocked or chats can be marked as spam. Messages are protected with end-to-end encryption just like WhatsApp. The picture, voice message and file sending features also work just like WhatsApp. You can also search.
On the other hand, you can continue to use the standard version of WhatsApp as usual. However, if the WhatsApp Business account is linked to a separate phone number, a dual SIM smartphone is required to use both apps simultaneously.
The application can be downloaded for free and used completely free of charge.
