Why WhatsApp’s API is a big deal for social media customer service, and why Twitter should be worried
If you haven’t yet seen, WhatsApp recently announced it’s business API, allowing businesses to respond to customers for free within 24 hours, and charging them a fee thereafter. This is a completely new revenue model for not only Facebook and WhatsApp, but different to anything we’ve really seen in social media to date.
Up until this point, most revenue was generated through ads. Plain and simple, and expected. The strategy being adopted by WhatsApp points to businesses serving customers, in a channel they want to communicate in, and incentivising them to do so in a prompt fashion. In essence, focusing in on customer experience.
I saw this diagram on a Hubspot article the other day and after seeing the announcement about WhatsApp, it can’t help but feel timely:
Making it about the customer
When you think about it, it’s really smart. One key point to all of this is, businesses can’t contact customers without them contacting the business. So no random contact can be made with a consumer. And, looking at how Facebook Messenger is starting to model itself, I’d expect to see the offering of advertising come in time, if a customer has previously been in contact.
Something that may (probably won’t) surprise you, is that I predominantly use social media to contact businesses for customer service. If I need to use a phone, I’m half way out of the door (I actually unsubscribed from a paying service recently where the brand wouldn’t take ownership over social media, of a mistake on their part, and kept insisting I call up to get things resolved). Not only that, but Twitter is my first go to customer service channel, Messenger second, email third. Messenger is getting closer to Twitter over time, based on some of the experiences I’ve had there.
Now let’s just dwell on that for a second, and give some context. When reading this Techcrunch article, two things jumped out to me:
“There’s no requirement related to the number of messages being sent. Although the API is intended to be used by larger businesses, some today are using it for customer service which often means they’re receiving more messages than they’re sending, the company noted.”
and
“As users invite more businesses to communicate with them, WhatsApp may start to feel like more like an email inbox or even a Twitter-like support channel.”
So, businesses can use this channel as much as they want, and the prime use case will be customer service in an inbox format. AND you’re incentivised for replying quickly. Twitter needs to be worried about this.
Keeping you in the ecosystem
If I could use WhatsApp to deal with customer service, in between messaging my Mum and Dad about visiting for the weekend, and messaging my friends about the football game on TV, I definitely would. And I would stop going out to another app to do that. On top of this, I’d probably continue using Messenger and Instagram’s inbox for messaging friends and other brands I can’t contact via WhatsApp. So essentially, I will not leave the Facebook ecosystem.
Now I know, this isn’t what Twitter is all about BUT, it’s a huge part of how large brands use the Twitter platform, and this could have a dramatic impact on the platforms usage. When I started to think about, I tried to think of what Twitter has changed around this “customer” experience in the last couple of years. I can’t remember any real change regarding customer service on Twitter. Maybe some AI from some brands, but that’s about it. It still feels like it did 1 or 2 years ago.
If Facebook brings all this together over time, making it easier to ingest messaging across all of their platforms, that my friends, is a game changer, and will keep you in their ecosystem for longer, and engaging you through various mediums from messages, to ads.
I’ll be watching with interest as this develops and would love to hear from any brands that are using the API of their experiences!
