MESSAGING An intimate medium for sharing personal views and feelings. As one user of Facebook-owned service WhatsApp said, this is a whisper of a digital cocktail party. Today, some of the world’s largest brands are entering this personal realm. Recognizing the limitations of traditional communication channels such as call centers and email, companies began using independent apps such as WhatsApp and its sister apps Facebook Messenger, Apple’s iMessage, and Line a few years ago.
The pandemic has brought a pandemic to all such apps. Messaging on Facebook’s photo sharing apps Instagram and Messenger has increased by 40%. Currently, four-fifths of mobile device time is spent on chat apps. Startups with the technology to connect companies to messaging platforms, as messaging has become essential to the business, not just experimental, because companies can usually rely on going where their customers are. Says Javier Mata, the founder of Yalo. Companies used to use them primarily for customer service. We now want people to chat and buy products, as hundreds of millions of Chinese do on WeChat, owned by China’s most powerful tech giant, Tencent.
Many popular messaging platforms are encrypted, making it difficult to obtain data about transactions. But growth is definitely happening. Today, more than a billion people interact with businesses via chat, with the exception of China. Every day, 175 million people send messages to WhatsApp business accounts…
