This week, the team at Whatsapp announced an upcoming program aimed at providing businesses with better tools to communicate with their customers. According to Alex Heath of Business Insider, Facebook plans to charge businesses for this new service.

Facebook seems to be pursuing separate monetization strategies for Messenger and Whatsapp. Currently the social media giant does not charge businesses to communicate directly with customers on Messenger, but it does run ads there. Asking businesses to pay for tools that support direct-to-customer communication on Whatsapp is a new approach.

Based on the Whatsapp blog post, a pilot program is already underway to test out the new customer communication service. One aspect of the program consists of verifying business accounts. Verification seems to hinge on validating the authenticity of a business’s phone number. Validated phone numbers appear in Whatsapp with a green check mark.

A second aspect of the program is comprised of tools supporting business-to-customer communication. Whatsapp is vague about just what these tools entail. They do, however, make the statement that companies can use the service to “provide customers with useful notifications like flight times, delivery confirmations, and other updates.”

These examples sound like automated notifications that could easily be handled by a chatbot. Is Facebook’s goal to build a robust chatbot infrastructure within Whatsapp and charge brands for the service? If so, it’s a radically different approach than the one they’re pursuing on their Messenger platform. If that is indeed the Whatsapp strategy and it succeeds, we’ll need to watch for impacts to Messenger and potentially other chatbot platforms used by brands.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication, Articles