In recent years, WhatsApp has stopped being a personal messaging app and has become much more than that. Currently, we have broadcast lists, channels, stories or communities, a large number of different functions that make it seem more like a social network than the messaging application that it originally was. One of these additional functions is WhatsApp Business or WhatsApp for companies, a service that has been active for several years and that allows companies to start conversations with customers in the app.
Business accounts on WhatsApp can be beneficial for users in many ways. For example, they allow users to talk to customer service teams easily via chat, or they allow companies to send useful information to the user about their services, such as confirmation codes.
However, the emergence of companies on WhatsApp has also had an undesired effect: marketing teams try to take advantage of any communication channel with customers and users to develop advertising campaigns and launch content. In the end, this has meant that, in some cases, companies abuse and send unnecessary marketing messages that can be classified as spam.
It is in this context that WhatsApp has been working on ways to improve communication between individual users and companies with WhatsApp Business. Until now, a user could block or report the conversation with a company, and this already helped WhatsApp to detect misuse. However, it is a fairly limited option since it is ‘all or nothing’, and if the user blocks the company from receiving advertising messages, they will not be able to receive other information that may be useful.
That is why the company is now experimenting with new functions that allow users to specifically choose what type of messages they want to receive from companies.
Greater control for the user
As can be seen in screenshots shared by Techcrunch, users will be able to indicate whether or not they are interested in receiving “offers and advertisements”, or choose not to receive any communication of this type (similar to how we unsubscribe from a newsletter or email monitoring list).
Messages sent by WhatsApp Business accounts will be divided into four categories: marketing, utilities, authentication and (customer) service. This categorization already existed within WhatsApp, but it will now be when users can specifically choose which of these types of messages they authorize to receive in their application. In this way, they will be able to communicate with a company to speak with customer service, or have the channel open to receive authentication codes, but they will be able to prohibit the sending of advertising communications.
This is in addition to a regulation that WhatsApp implemented in early 2024, when it limited the number of advertising messages that a user can receive per day, although without specifying what this number is.
The intention of all this is to prevent what we already suffer from happening with WhatsApp in our email inboxes: that they are invaded by newsletters and promotional emails from each and every one of the services we use. A truly annoying situation.
