We do love a good leak here at Goos3D and well wouldn’t you know we have gone and found another one. Yurt! WhatsApp Business has been leaked, giving us a good look at how the latest from the Facebook-owned company is going to work. Better again this leak explains the differences between both, WhatsApp for Business and regular WhatsApp.
The app is called WhatsApp Business on the Google Play Store and will be separate from the normal WhatsApp app. They even changed the logo ever so slightly by sticking a B inside the bubble. Quick side note, we have only seen this stuff from the online links. The app is in beta testing and is limited to a private group of testers. Unless you have the APK- which we may or may not have hidden somewhere before the end of this article.
Can you spot the difference?
The new app was officially announced about a month ago but according to the leak, WhatsApp actually had a survey to enrol potential SMB’s to test the platform prior to its release. These chosen companies have then been asked to give feedback on pretty much everything from new features like automatic responses, message analytics to basic functionality like account setup and the migration of data from regular WhatsApp.
Here is what we have managed to find out so far:
Business Profiles
WhatsApp Business will be coming with a range of new features such as chat migration (which I will talk about later), auto response, analytics as well as a personalized business profile.
From what we gather you set up your business profile within the initial setup. The app itself will ask you things like ‘Business Description’, ‘Website’, ‘Address’ and other business related nonsense I know nothing about. Interestingly enough for those with their fingers in many pies, you can add more than one website to each profile and you can even have more than one account.
I spent a bit of time thinking about this and I can only think of personal and business as being a user’s two accounts unless you want to set up a complete business profile just for your local Junior Football Club.
More than one account? Sure go on then
What is really interesting about this WhatsApp Business leak is this option for “chat migration”. They have thought through pretty much any likely scenario your standard business owner may require such as using one phone and one app, using one phone and two apps where WhatsApp Business uses different mobile number, one phone and two apps where WhatsApp Business uses different landline number. My poor head that was a lot of thinking!
If you want to use the normal app and business app at the same time on the same phone, the only stipulation is that the number on both apps is separate from each other. Or you can migrate your personal account into a business account, or just use your landline number. The range of options here is quite handy, sure just check out this nifty little how-to graphic we found online:
Seems simple enough and as we said you can even use a landline number, which is handy as hell if you want to keep your personal and business accounts apart. This also upgrades the landlines to support multimedia messages using the business app without the need to actually do anything. Ya landline multi-media messaging just sounds really wrong, but oh so right.
Analytics
Do you know what business people love and no matter how much you give, they always want more? Data analytics. WhatsApp clearly knew this about their audience and while this feature seems to be still a work in progress, business owners will be able to view and send reports around a number of messages sent vs received and all of that jazz. Why this is relevant or important I’m not overly sure, but it’s there and business folk love that shit so whatever floats your boat I say.
Out of Office goes Mobile
Image credit: Android Police
The best part of any office job is that moment when you finally set up your out of office and get ready to strut out of that place completely forgetting you will be back in a week. But that is not the point why not go a step further with your WhatsApp Business profile and set up a couple of auto-responses which will act as your mobile version of out of office.
You just know a client, a customer or some numpty is going to contact you outside of business hours and having that access at your fingertips could mean never truly leaving work. You can customise the text in the ‘Away Messages’ along with any predefined schedule for the number of days. I’m willing to go out on a limb here and let the funniest message become the official Goos3D auto response- so far I’m thinking
“The PlayStation got me before you did, good luck and goodbye”
Let us know if you can do better in the comments below.
Essentially WhatsApp Business is going to be exactly what it says on the tin. The exact same app but with a business focus. By the time a full version is released we are likely to see a payment system in place, which will be interesting to see how that works out from an encryption point of view.If you run a business and wish to sign up for WhatsApp Business, you need to fill up this survey, and then download the app from here.
More WhatsApp groups. Awesome.
