Mehta on Thursday announced that it will begin rolling out Verified to its WhatsApp Business app in India, Brazil, Indonesia and Colombia. The company also introduced new AI tools to help businesses better serve their customers.
Meta's “verified” badge means that a business has registered with Meta and has anti-spoofing measures in place. Last year, the company said it would soon begin testing Meta verification. Small businesses use WhatsApp.
“Meta certification makes it easy for small businesses to build trust with their customers and establish a brand that customers feel comfortable reaching out to,” Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, said at the Conversations event.
“We're also expanding the ways in which businesses can support their customers, including voice calling on the WhatsApp Business platform, allowing customers to speak directly with businesses about bigger purchases or more complex questions that can't be resolved through chat,” he added.
As for the new AI tools, Meta will allow businesses to enable AI in chats with customers to provide support or help sell products and services. The concept is to have AI act as an assistant within the WhatsApp Business app, allowing you to create Facebook and Instagram ads that will launch a WhatsApp chat when clicked, or get support with features like catalogues and quick replies.
The company plans to test the feature in India soon.
“Our vision is not to just build one AI assistant, but to enable a variety of AIs that can be used for a variety of purposes, including business. Any business needs to be able to get started quickly.
The company also introduced calling functionality in chat, allowing users to call large businesses on WhatsApp with just one tap, and a customized customer messaging feature for businesses, allowing them to send personal messages like birthday greetings or holiday promotions faster and more efficiently than they could send manually.
Zuckerberg said the company's new optimized delivery tools will help businesses leverage the strengths of its AI systems to deliver the right message to the right people on WhatsApp.
“Until now, businesses would typically send messages on WhatsApp to all customers who wanted to receive updates. But now, using Ads Manager, they can deliver messages to customers who are most likely to be interested. Our AI system will recommend the right subset of recipients,” he added.
Mehta said the new features will help businesses see a better return on investment.
