4 solutions WhatsApp can offer to become the messaging leader for Businesses

Early this year, WhatsApp announced last month that they are no longer pursuing the $0.99 annual subscription model for consumers. Duh! I must admit that I'm one of those who refuse to pay the subscription fee. I mean, $0.99 a year is nothing, but it's also an unnecessary expense when there's so much competition in the business of messaging to switch to.

The one thing that we have to agree, is that the 990 million WhatsApp users is a big tick in the box to show that WhatsApp is here to stay (for at least the next year or so). With its large volume of users, WhatsApp now want to shift itself into the B2C messaging space. I think this is a step in the right direction and here are 4 solutions that they can offer to do this successfully.

Allow brands to engage consumers through WhatsApp

I'm not talking about ads here. What I'm referring to is the same strategy that WeChat has adopted where brands can create official accounts to represent the brand and engage with consumers. Official accounts allows brands to share the latest news with their target audience and grow the level of engagement with them through WhatsApp.

Official accounts builds authenticity about the brand where consumers know that what's posted by these accounts are real and originates from the company. Therefore if they were to send any comments or feedbacks to official accounts, they can be assured that someone in the company will be receiving them.

Extend the mobile messaging platform into multiple channels

WhatsApp is primarily used on mobile phones and early adopters like me are using WhatsApp Web to communicate as well. WhatsApp needs to evolve into a multi-channel platform where businesses can embed WhatsApp in their websites (and disrupt livechat solutions along the way), marketing collaterals and advertisements.

Imagine a time when nobody clicks on an email link on a website to send an email anymore. Instead, they just click on a WhatsApp link and type the message into a popup WhatsApp message box immediately. That will be a much more elegant user experience for consumers and an efficient communication method for businesses.

Disrupt existing customer service strategies

Customer service hotlines are common for businesses but as a customer, I hate them! You jump through so many hoops in order to reach the right enquiry line, and then they make you listen to irritating music while waiting for your turn with the operator. From a business point of view, it's resource intensive and simply not scalable.

WhatsApp can disrupt this old way of doing things by allowing customers to contact the customer service using their platform. It's much more efficient and scalable because businesses can have one operator manage 2 or more customer enquiries on their computers (an enhanced version WhatsApp Web, perhaps?). The best thing is that operators are not limited to communicating solutions through verbal communication. They can choose to send a link to a particular web page to fill up a form, image of the product that the customer is looking for, or even a pin of a map to the location that the customer is asking for.

For customers, they don't have to stop doing everything and stay on the line. Instead, they can continue to do their work while waiting for the response on WhatsApp. Because messages are encrypted and secured, WhatsApp can also develop additional authentication profiles so that customers can use them to authenticate themselves with the customer service operator without answering questions like, "what's your date of birth?"

Partner with credit card companies to make mobile payment a reality

There are many players in the market who are venturing into the mobile payment business. There are the big boys like Apple, Google, and even Samsung who wants their customers to use their devices to make mobile payments. The biggest problem is that these solutions are only limited to their products and it's hard to achieve mass adoption in the market because everyone has limited share of voice in the market.

Then there's the success story of WeChat who is able to get their users to make mobile payments through their platform successfully in China. This is the very success that WhatsApp can seek to emulate from.

WhatsApp just needs to partner with Visa and Mastercard to allow payments through PayWave and MasterPass, the contactless payment system created by both companies and create a global success while limiting WeChat to only China. It's just common sense.

These are just some of the ideas I thought of while taking the train to work today and I'd love to hear what you think about them. Please share them in the comments section.