WhatsApp plans customer service arm for business

WHATSAPP has laid the ground for businesses to contact its billion-plus users in the first sign that one of the internet’s hottest properties plans to make significant revenues.

The social messaging app, bought by Facebook for $19bn (£14bn) two years ago, rewrote its terms and conditions yesterday to allow corporate accounts for the first time.

WhatsApp now plans to conduct trials of business accounts in the coming months. It aims to make the app a replacement for customer service phone lines and email accounts by allowing banks, airlines and others to talk directly to customers, warning them about fraudulent transactions or flight delays, for example.

When WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook it promised not to introduce the advertising that has made its owner one of the world’s most valuable companies, leading many to question whether the price that Mark Zuckerberg paid for it could ever be justified.

The app used to charge customers a nominal 69p a year to use it, but dropped the fee earlier this year, raising the prospect of business accounts.

Becoming a “portal” for payments and other services has become lucrative for WeChat, a Chinese rival, but has proved more difficult for other messaging apps. But WhatsApp, the world’s most popular app of its kind, believes it is ubiquitous enough to replace phone calls and emails for many customer service departments.

The app became one of just a handful in the world to pass 1bn users this year, and more WhatsApp messages are now sent than text messages.

The new privacy policy will also see data shared between WhatsApp and Facebook for the first time, allowing the world’s dominant social network to better target advertising and to suggest more friend relationships.

The move was interpreted yesterday as a relaxing of the messaging app’s respected privacy credentials. However, Jan Koum, the app’s founder, emphasised that messages would remain encrypted, preventing either Facebook or WhatsApp from reading them.