WhatsApp Business: Every entrepreneur must know these features for growth.

Whats app, business

It has been reported that WhatsApp is one of the most popular and used tools for businesses to connect with their customers. There are millions of people who exchange messages with a WhatsApp Business account every day across the world.

Keeping the needs of business owners in mind, WhatsApp has built specific offerings for businesses of all sizes through two solutions.

WhatsApp Enterprise Application

WhatsApp Enterprise Platform

The perfect ally for small businesses:

WhatsApp Business is a free application, available for Android and iOS, designed specifically for small businesses. With this app, small business owners can share details about their business, stay connected with their customers and use tools to manage their messages and conversations.

Through this function, businesses can display useful information for customers to learn about the company, description of products and services, business hours, location, and website at a glance, as simple as consulting a contact's information on WhatsApp.

- Product Catalog: This tool allows you to create a product catalogue available directly in the business profile, where customers can quickly view the available products with a simple click on the icon.
- Quick Auto-replies: Messaging tools make it easy to connect with customers to automatically reply with a welcome and leave messages, or create quick replies to reuse frequently sent messages.
- Labels Up to 20 labels with different colors can be created and added to an entire chat or to specific messages, so entrepreneurs can locate messages quickly.
- Promoting your business: A company's WhatsApp profile can be shared in two ways: as a direct link or a QR code. By sharing any of these with customers, they can use them to automatically start a chat with your business.
- With ads that click to WhatsApp, you can add a Send Message button to your Facebook or Instagram ads that will open a conversation thread in the WhatsApp Business App. This allows customers to connect with your business on WhatsApp after clicking the button on your ad.
- It is ideal for managing large volumes of messages.
  
  The WhatsApp Business API platform enables midsize and large businesses to chat with customers at scale through programmatic access to WhatsApp, strengthen the checkout process, and deepen customer relationships.
- Connect through conversations at scale: Communication with customers can be automated through built-in bots, so companies can create a welcome, absent, or frequently asked questions message and automate customer service functions.
- Build a buyer journey: Build custom solutions that make it easy for customers to browse your products and place an order right from within WhatsApp.

Productivity features: Businesses can enable autoresponders with a list of options to answer questions, so customers avoid having to type out an entire question, thus making the experience easy and intuitive.

WhatsApp rolls out in-app shopping products with JioMart.

For the first time, WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Meta Plat forms is rolling out a shopping product in India. For the first time, users will be able to browse and purchase groceries and other household products without leaving the app. Whatsapp unveiled the new tool alongside jioMart, part of Reliance Industries Ltd.’s Jio Platforms, an Indian tech company that Meta invested almost $6 billion into in early 2020. The new feature lets users in India shop for products from JioMart and pay for them directly within the app. People could previously browse products via WhatsApp but had to leave the service to finish the transaction.

The app now makes money by charging some businesses to message customers and also by selling click-to-message ads, which are ads that appear in users’ Facebook or Instagram feeds and then kick them into a private chat with a business once they’re clicked. Those ads already bring in billions of dollars per year across all of Meta’s apps. Zuckerberg is targeting a much larger business opportunity for WhatsApp related to commerce and payments, especially in emerging markets where the app is popular, like India and Brazil.

Part of the struggle for Meta has been related to payments regulation. The company tested payments in India for years before getting formal government approval in 2020 to expand the test into a full-blown feature. The online grocery push by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani is competing with Walmart Inc.-controlled Flipkart and Amazon.com Inc. for a bigger piece of India’s growing online retail market. A partnership with WhatsApp could just give it a much-needed boost.

When Jio plat forms and Meta announced our partnership in 2020, Mark and I shared a vision of bringing more people and businesses online and creating truly innovative solutions that will add convenience to the daily lives of every Indian," Ambani, who is chairman of Reliance Industries, said in a statement. "The Jio mart on WhatsApp experience furthers our commitment to enabling a simple and convenient way of online shopping for millions of Indians." A Meta spokesperson said the company hopes to expand in India to team up with more businesses and also aims to bring this shopping tool to other countries.

What is a Virtual Mobile Number?

A VMN is a perfectly legitimate means of using a phone number to call someone over Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP. There are a number of companies that offer this service in India—Doosra, Servetel, Knowlarity, Tata Tele Business Services, and Call Hippo, considered by many to be among the top providers of this service.

To snag a VMN, you can sign up with any of these companies, pay a monthly fee, and begin your business without a physical tele-footprint, so to speak.

Once you have your VMN, you can use the number to register as a business on WhatsApp and enjoy all the privileges afforded to those with a physical SIM card.

"With access to WhatsApp Business facilities, companies will now get the famous green tick on their number, keep track of all their communication in one tight space, send broadcast messages to all end customers, etc."

For small and medium enterprises, expenditure on purposes such as internal communication, while vital, is not a priority when so many other business areas are demanding attention, he explains. "With WhatsApp, all you have to do is use the Slack tool for internal communication. It allows you to create various groups, send essential documents for knowledge or information sharing, and create the perfect collaborative atmosphere, "he explains.

But, for most of us, WhatsApp Business is a way of directly connecting with a business for various reasons—product inquiries or, as is the case mostly, customer support. "Providing good client support is a necessary part of the business commitment. By selecting WhatsApp Business, companies are adding another support channel to the existing customer care. This is especially useful to businesses with international customers and local ones, "Dudhwewala adds." Add WhatsApp Business features to this mix, and you have the ideal solution.