WhatsApp Business: 4 Ways to Effectively, Enhance Your Work Entrepreneur India brings you four features of WhatsApp Business that will help you grow, communicate better, work efficiently, and create an impact

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted more than ever how important local businesses are in connecting communities and providing a backbone to our economy. With this ongoing period of physical distancing and no respite in the current coronavirus situation, MSMEs are in survival mode. Businesses have been severely impacted. They are still coping with a shortage of working capital and a lack of means to run their business. As per reports, MSMEs are the second-largest employment generator in the country. So, it is crucial to enable access and availability to digital tools that can augment the growth of small businesses in our country and help them scale.

As our country continues to transform into a digitally empowered society, it is no surprise that business tendencies have evolved in that direction too. Research shows that people connecting via message not just on a personal basis but also professional. Messaging with businesses is becoming more and more common all around the world.

As per Facebook Messaging Survey by Nielsen, among people who message businesses, 63% say they have started messaging businesses more often over the past two years, and 67% plan to message businesses even more over the next two years.

On one hand, e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, and more have become a medium for small retailers and vendors to conduct business, on other digital platforms like WhatsApp have played an instrumental role in helping small businesses interact with their customers and optimize sales especially now. Pandemic has made us moved towards a technological era. Digital tools can serve as a lifeline for businesses and customers to stay connected. Not many realise this but WhatsApp can be for more than just a chatting app. WhatsApp business has various features that can help one enhance their business and perform operations effectively.

According to a recent survey by Endurance International Group, preference for using digital tools is now approximately 1.9X higher than traditional sales interactions and more than 50% of the SMEs surveyed embraced video-conferencing tools and WhatsApp for business purposes. According to data by Morning Consult Intelligence, 70% of SMBs on WhatsApp in India say they built their business on the platform, while 77% of SMBs businesses on WhatsApp in India have been able to hire more employees as they grew after joining the platform.

Digital is the way to go if you want to survive and stay in the business for long. Entrepreneur India brings you four features of WhatsApp Business that will help you grow, communicate better, work efficiently, and create an impact.

1. Get Professional

Start with creating a Business Profile. This feature lets businesses add important company details to their profile, which helps create a formal presence, feel professional, and assure customers that they are interacting with a legitimate business.

2. Showcase What You Have

With the Catalog feature, businesses can create a free mobile storefront to showcase their goods or services and customers can easily browse and discover things they might like to buy.

Why is this important? Catalogs make businesses look more professional by keeping customers engaged in the chat without needing to switch to the website for relevant information. You wouldn't want your customer hustling around a lot of sites.

3. Quick Response

The way you respond creates all the difference in the world. Messaging Tools help business owners streamline their operations and significantly save time. Quick replies allow businesses to easily address the frequently asked questions they receive, and "away' messages inform customers of when they can expect a reply. Try out this feature to build customer relationships and resolve issues.

4. Segregation

A company has a lot going at the same time. That's when you can use the Labels feature. It helps you to organised by sorting your customer conversations into different categories like "new customers' or "pending orders'. This helps them easily organise and search for chats and messages.

While the lockdown has given several businesses the impetus to rely more on digital tools, one thing's for sure - it is time for you to meet the customers from anywhere, anytime without losing on the business.