WhatsApp: On January 18, WhatsApp officially launched WhatsApp Business, its application for companies, after it had already been in testing for a few months. The application is free; Although initially it could only remain downloaded from Google Play in Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as of the 22nd it is also available in Spain. The business assures that it will be available for the rest of the world and the rest of the devices during the next weeks.

This is very good news for all companies that are currently using WhatsApp as an additional communication channel with their customers and who will now see the possibilities offered by the application increased. For those of you who have to make sure done it yet, maybe now is the time to start doing it. At the time of writing this article, WhatsApp installed on 1,300 million devices worldwide according to sources from the company itself, and in Spain, it occupies first place in the list of instant messaging applications, used by 92.8% of the users.

What News Does WhatsApp Business Bring?

At some glance, it can look like the same application. They only changed the logo and color to avoid confusing users who have both apps on their devices. Once you are in the settings, you can see the actual changes. From there we can configure our company profile, welcome messages, opening hours, and quick responses or access statistics.

Company Profile

This option is the most important, here we will define our company data such as name, sector, physical address, email, website, business hours, and a brief description of our services.

Welcome, Out Of Office, And Quick Response Messages

The first option allows us to configure a standard message of up to 200 characters that will remain sent to customers the first time they start a conversation with us or if we have not spoken for more than 14 days.

The second section allows us to define a message that will be sent to our clients in case they contact us outside of our business hours. They will only remain sent if the mobile has a connection to be able to receive the message from our client first.

Finally, we can configure quick responses and assign abbreviations so that when we type the shortcut, the phrase we configure loaded in the writing area. For example, we can define that the / hello shortcut is the message “Hello, thank you for contacting Extra Software, how can I help you? It is important that it is put in the writing box and not sent directly because that way we change what we want before sending the message.

Statistics

This section is the one that, in our opinion, has the most work to come as it contains relatively little information at the moment. It only shows us the number of messages sent, delivered, received, and read.