There is a new kid in the tech world: WhatsApp Business. This android mobile app allows small business enterprises to create business WhatsApp profiles that they can use to communicate with their employees and clients. It even has automated business greetings and replies for quick communications. The profile can include email and physical addresses, business description, website URL, and other pertinent business details.

Case study: The facts

WhatsApp for Business is available not only in the Play Store but also on the web. That will make it easier for businesses to manage their profiles and to pursue varied business leads. From the web, business owners will be able to track their progress through the analytics data this app provides. It is expected that this new trend will hit the ground running immediately it is rolled out across the world.

WhatsApp Business accounts will need WhatsApp verification, just in the same manner that Twitter and Instagram verify accounts. Also, every business WhatsApp number will be verified to ascertain that it belongs to the business in question and to eliminate the chances of fraudsters pausing as business people. The verification will also help other WhatsApp users to distinguish between private accounts and business accounts.

Can a business send WhatsApp messages in the ordinary way that users send amongst themselves? Yes, they can, but the users ought to opt-in for the messages first. It will be incumbent upon businesses to market their businesses and create quality, sharable content for their audiences so that they can convince them to opt-in for WhatsApp Business pages.

5 Advantages of WhatsApp Business Accounts

Initially, the WhatsApp Business app was limited to Android users who operate businesses in the US, the UK, Italy, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico. Since its inception slightly over a year ago, the app has launched in many countries now and is gaining popularity impressively well. As such, early adopters of this new service stand to gain in the following, among other ways.

1. SMEs will be easily discovered

With the verification that business accounts now get from WhatsApp, businesses will be easily seen and discovered by prospective clients. Also, the fact that a business will be able to share its addresses- both email and physical- means that customers will have more avenues to interact with a business. This wasn’t previously possible with the ordinary user-to-user WhatsApp as business accounts operated like any other individual user’s account.

2. Easier customer interactions

Custom and quick replies help business managers and promoters to respond to customer questions easily and quickly. You can, for example, save replies to the frequently asked questions and then instead of typing responses every time those questions come up, you can simply reuse the messages you had saved earlier. Greeting and automated messages, on the other hand, will help you to engage your customers in a hospitable manner even without having to think too hard for what to tell them. Day Translations is a great example of how they have integrated Whatsapp in their business. Because of their international market, they have included Whatsapp as a form of easy communication and also part of their internal working system.

3. Tracking ability

WhatsApp for Business allows you to track your messages in order to identify who read them, which demographic within a population reads your messages, who acted on the message, and who ignored. That way, you will know where you need to improve in regards to your content and which gender or age bracket to target.

4. Easy flow of feedbacks

If you can receive feedbacks fast enough, you are able to act on the information before things get out of hand. WhatsApp for Business gives you the chance to interact with your customer in a more like face-to-face or one-on-one engagement. This ease of flow of important information gives you leverage over competitors within your niche.

5. Translation ability

NH Global Partners say that “Thanks to WhatsApp’s increased features, it is now possible to communicate instantly with your workers in China or other Asian countries. That is good for business. As a matter of fact, it is now possible to incorporate a translation app within WhatsApp and use it to instantly translate chats from Chinese, for example, to English.” This eliminates the need for going back and forth trying to translate chats and replying to them. If you have been working with a translation company or a professional employer organization in China and East Asia as a whole, then WhatsApp for Business will improve your interactions with these business associates.

Abhishek Munian

Product Marketing | gupshup.io

February 25, 2019

We’ve ushered into another year of MWC!

From the industry stalwarts to the startup companies of the mobile, messaging and telecom ecosystem MWC is the most certainly the place to be. For the next few days, Fira de Barcelona will be witness to major announcements, thoughts that redefine industries across verticles, groundbreaking technology and innovations.

The future of mobile technology ecosystem as we know it today will be shaped in the next few days.

Our team has arrived to share the excitement with you!

Meet our team and get the latest dig on tech and innovations we’ve been working on lately.

Drop us an email at mktg@gupshup.io to set up a meet!

P.S – Beer is on us 🙂

Tropicana, Las Vegas will be host to Namescon the biggest and the most pivotal event in the domain
industry. Amidst the several conferences, talks and sessions spanned across four days – 27th – 30th of
Jan, the event will also be host to a chatbot centric hackathon!

Developers, are you listening?

By Beerud Sheth

Founder & CEO | gupshup.io

Dec 31, 2018

As 2018 draws to a close, it’s a good time to take stock of the year in the world of messaging and conversational experiences. Unlike prior years, this one is characterized by less hype and more progress. Developers have been quietly working away, far from the madding crowd, as messaging volumes grow massively and conversational experiences continue to pervade every aspect of human existence.

Over the last few years, mobile messaging usage has exploded. It now dominates smartphone usage. While consumer communication grew rapidly a few years ago, the more recent and interesting phenomenon is the rise of “messaging as a platform” – a platform for developers and enterprises to engage their customers and build advanced conversational experiences. Messaging and conversational experiences are gradually transforming every aspect of the human-computer interface.

Machine translation is on the rise. Google Translate, as well as other automated translation solutions like Bing Microsoft Translator, Babel Fish, PROMT, ImTranslator, have significantly improved over the years. With the help of neural networks and deep learning, they are now capable of translating more languages with better accuracy.

One of the notable aspects of machine translation is the use of bots. What are they? How are they related to search engine bots? Know the answers to these questions and more in the following discussions.

In this week’s blog, we thought of drawing your attention to a chatbot that does an excellent job at utilizing all the chatbot functionalities provided by Facebook while also being true to its roots

From chatting to conversing, the natural progression of assistants ‘sounds’ good

“Hey Google, how does the traffic look today”

“The roads are empty today you should reach for work earlier than usual”

This has become a common practice for households all across the world. Voice powered assistants have ‘quietly’ integrated with our lives. The world of voice-powered assistants are dominated by the likes of Alexa by Amazon, Apple’s Siri and the one we will be covering in depth for this blog….the Google assistant colloquially called hey google.

After being the talk of the town for successive google i/o conferences, ok google has solidified as a service ubiquitous with voice-powered assistants.  Google assistants are empowering smart homes and automobiles with the power of voice.

If you’ve been wondering how some chatbots have grown exponentially with regards pooling in  Daily active users in the thousands, reach and popularity ….well you would be surprised to know that they concentrate their efforts into solidifying the basics instead of dabbling all available means for promotions.

Well, now that you know what to do you would still be asking yourself how?

Like always we’ve got you covered!

Customer interaction is the key to success for brands. Whether it’s to drive sales, handle customer service issues, or foster and continue a relationship, two-way communication is critical. As these interactions occur, companies must do everything they can to collect and analyze useful data that delivers a problem-solving result, and artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to play an increasingly important role in this equation.

As AI solidifies its position as a cornerstone of innovation for businesses, it continues to evolve and adapt. AI is already improving our interaction with technology through different forms of machine learning that recognize patterns in data to predict future outcomes. It also has the capability to better understand the massive amounts of data and information that businesses search for and apply those predictions to automated tasks. One way that companies are applying this shift in technology and data processing is through chatbots.