

WeChat Service Account is a business solution that allows companies to contact customers and leverage the app to meet their service needs. The image below is an example of a standard WeChat search screen. While it's used primarily for text conversations, it also supports video calls, voice messages, and in-app games. WeChat, owned by Tencent, is a China-based messaging service. The image below is a sample WhatsApp Business App business profile and correspondence with a customer. WhatsApp Business App, launched in 2018, gives businesses a new way to communicate with customers on a platform they're already using. The image below is a standard chat thread on WhatsApp. It is a mobile-first app but has recently become available to desktop users. WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, is a messaging app where users can send text messages, voice notes, and video chat with others. In this post, we'll discuss two of the most popular apps, WeChat and WhatsApp, compare them in terms of user base, features, and service opportunities offered by each app. However, there are a wide variety of platforms to choose from. In short, messaging apps are valuable because you're meeting customers where they already are. Facebook Messenger is a popular app that you may already be familiar with, and it has around 1.3 million global active users.Īlthough they may seem like more of a casual channel instead of a business tool, messaging apps are beneficial for customer service, especially considering that people spend four hours and 10 minutes a day on mobile devices, and 44% of that time is on social and communication apps. If you're unfamiliar, messaging apps allow users to have instant communication with others.


One of the places that customers want multi-channel support is within the messaging apps they're already using. And Cathcart says WhatsApp will be expanding its forwarding limits to Communities, so messages that have already been forwarded can only be forwarded again to one group at a time.They want to be able to pick up the phone, send an email, or send a tweet to your service reps and have a seamless experience that brings them the solutions they desire. Users will have to be invited to join Communities-they won't simply be able to search for open, free-for-all channels, as they are in services like Telegram. With Communities, Cathcart says, there's potential to further improve these issues by empowering administrators who have a more nuanced understanding of their organizations or groups and creating structures that can flag potentially abusive behavior. The company has attempted to limit the spread of disinformation using tools like forwarding limits and reporting mechanisms to approach the problem from different angles. This means, though, that abusive and illegal communications also receive that same protection, a challenge that has plagued WhatsApp and other platforms. “But I think it’ll be particularly helpful for us to have other communities around the world that are dealing with very different types of problems and challenges use it, because we’ll get feedback that better matches a much broader range of needs than just what we’re going to get from our own team.”Įnd-to-end encrypted communication services like WhatsApp offer users privacy and security assurances because the platforms are designed so the companies that run them can't access the content of users' messages and calls. “We’ve been using Communities ourselves internally for the last few months as we got all the pieces in place, and that’s been helping us find things we know we need and additions to make,” says Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp. WhatsApp says it is beginning limited beta testing of Communities now, with support for both iOS and Android, so it can get input before finalizing the feature. These groupings will also have new features for administrators so they can send messages to an entire community and add and remove sub-groups. In addition to the DMs and group chats that are already available, users will be able to bundle sets of group chats together under the umbrella of an organization or common theme.Ĭommunities will be housed in a tab separate from the standard WhatsApp landing page and will offer a way to organize disparate channels. In response, WhatsApp announced on Thursday that it is developing a new suite of features, known as “Communities,” that will allow the app to function more like productivity software, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams. The company says that throughout the Covid-19 pandemic users have expanded how they communicate on the platform-coming together to cope with challenges from parenting and schooling to mutual aid and political organizing. With more than 2 billion users, WhatsApp is the most popular end-to-end encrypted communication platform in the world.
