Conversations 2022: Meta’s Inaugural Business Messaging Conference

Takeaway

• Today we hosted Conversations, our inaugural event where we shared key product investments that will make it possible for people and businesses around the world to connect – right in the messaging platform of their choice.
• Mark Zuckerberg announced we’re opening WhatsApp to all businesses with the new cloud-based API on the WhatsApp Business Platform.
• With Recurring Notifications, we’re offering businesses a new way to re-engage with customers. This feature is now available on Messenger and will soon be available on Instagram.

The way people and businesses communicate is changing. One billion people message with a business each week on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Direct – whether it’s DMing brands, browsing product catalogs, asking for support, or interacting with stories. This consumer behavior is accelerating and it’s changing how business gets done. Today at Conversations, our inaugural business messaging event, we discussed how much messaging is transforming interactions between people and businesses, and why it needs to be the cornerstone for your next chapter of digital transformation.

Around the world, brands like KLM, C&A, Indosat and Aldi have already made this switch and are seeing gains in customer satisfaction, agent efficiency and improvements in marketing and sales – ultimately driving better results, at scale.

For the past few years, we have been paving the way together with our customers, partners, and developers – who all play a pivotal role in this transformation. Today we are sharing our new product investments that will enable businesses of all sizes to use messaging right now to:

• Start conversations with customers.
• Scale through conversations.
• Delight customers with a seamless experience.

Start conversations with customers

Click-to-message ads are one of our most popular ads formats, and they help customers to immediately start conversations with business with buttons that click over to Messenger or WhatsApp. Tens of millions of conversations are now started every day from ads that click-to-message.

Scale your business through conversations

We’re building tools that help businesses of every size automate their customer communications, so it’s easier to respond quickly to every interaction and free up employees for more complex exchanges.

At Conversations, Mark Zuckerberg announced we're opening up the new, cloud-based version of the WhatsApp Business Platform, hosted by Meta, to any business across the world. With this new API, we're offering free, secure cloud hosting services so businesses and developers can easily access our service within minutes; build directly on top of WhatsApp to customize their experience; and increase their response time for their customers. So now, whether a business wants to work with one of our 100+ partners or access our service directly from Meta, it will be much faster to get up and running on WhatsApp.

When growing a business, you need smart, robust and easy-to-use conversation tools. For smaller businesses using the WhatsApp Business app, we’re building tools so it’s easier to handle an influx of chats as they grow their customer base.

We recently acquired Kustomer, a people-centric, messaging-first CRM platform. It works across all the channels customers are used to – phone, email, chat, SMS and of course, messaging. Customer conversations are seamlessly funneled from each channel into one unified, single-screen view, so it’s easier for agents to better serve customers.

Meta Business Suite makes it easier for small businesses that are managing higher volumes of messages across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and, soon, WhatsApp – in one place. Meta Business Suite is used by over 30 million businesses who see 21% more extended conversations with customers.

Delight your customers with a seamless experience

Today we’re announcing a new way for businesses to keep the conversation going with Recurring Notifications. As businesses acquire new customers and begin to scale operations, there’s incredible opportunity to build loyalty and trust – and we believe this is where the value of messaging really shines. This new capability makes it easy to re-engage people right in the messaging thread and deliver tailored messaging at the best time for customers. Whether it’s hearing about special promotions, new product drops or newsletters with tips and tricks.

You can choose the topics you’d like to let people opt-in to; how often customers can hear from you; and shape your content, so your messages are always on-brand and relevant. Recurring notifications will also be available for businesses on Instagram this fall.

Delight your customers with a seamless experience

We’ll continue to add new conversational commerce capabilities, as well as new ways to engage and re-engage customers. In the long-term, we’ll invest in advanced AI tools and natural language processing to foster more meaningful conversations with customers.

The trend is clear – messaging represents a new digital frontier, and similar to the shift to mobile 10 years ago, businesses need to prepare. Let’s take on this new wave together.

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