From October 1st, companies that use WhatsApp Business will need to rethink the way they structure their services. The change is part of the new rules announced by Meta, which will charge individually for service messages sent by companies, replacing the model based on the conversational window. In practice, the efficiency of journeys no longer just influences the customer experience and starts to directly impact operational costs.
The change comes at a time when WhatsApp has already established itself as one of the main relationship channels between companies and consumers. According to data presented by Meta, more than 1 billion conversations between people and companies take place daily on its platforms, reinforcing the strategic role of messaging for sales, service and loyalty.
The news was presented and discussed during a meeting promoted by Hi Platform, which brought together company experts and Meta representatives to discuss the impacts of the new rules on service, sales and customer relationship operations.
For Hi Platform, the new policy inaugurates a new stage in the maturity of the conversational market. If in recent years the focus was on expanding automation and increasing service capacity, now the challenge becomes reducing unnecessary steps in conversations and increasing the efficiency of each interaction.
“The market spent years measuring success by the volume of automation. Now it will be necessary to measure efficiency. Each message sent by the company now represents a cost and this completely changes the way of designing a conversational operation. The objective is no longer just to respond quickly and becomes to resolve the customer's demand in the most intelligent way possible”, says Felipe Cucic, Head of Customer Experience at Hi Platform.
According to the company, operations with long hours, excessive menus and unclear flows tend to be the most impacted. In a simulation presented by Hi Platform, an operation with approximately 10 thousand calls per month and an average of nine messages sent by the company in each conversation could record an increase of around R$ 7.2 thousand per month with the new charge. On the other hand, reducing just three messages per service by reviewing journeys can represent savings of close to R$ 30 thousand per year.
In the company's assessment, this reduction does not mean reducing contact with the consumer, but eliminating interactions that do not add value. Features already available on WhatsApp Business, such as interactive buttons, lists, forms (Flows) and artificial intelligence to quickly identify user intent, make conversations more objective, reducing the number of messages needed to resolve a request.
The changes announced by Meta also include the adoption of billing in local currency for Brazilian companies, the future availability of Usernames, which will allow companies to be located directly by name within the application, and the expansion of Meta Business Agent, a solution based on artificial intelligence to automate sales, service and relationship journeys.
For Sidney Gimenez, Head of Sales at Hi Platform, the news represents a structural change in the role of messaging within companies.
“WhatsApp is no longer just a service channel. Today it participates in customer acquisition, sales, retention and revenue generation. Now it also directly influences the cost structure of operations. This means that conversational efficiency stops being a differentiator and becomes a strategic necessity.”
According to Sidney, organizations that start reviewing their journeys now will be better prepared to absorb changes without compromising the consumer experience.
“The path is not to reduce conversations, but to eliminate waste. Companies that use artificial intelligence, automation and native WhatsApp features to make their journeys smarter will be able to transform an operational change into a competitive advantage.”
Given this scenario, Hi Platform began analyzing its customers' conversational journeys to identify opportunities to simplify flows, reduce unnecessary messages and make better use of WhatsApp's native features and artificial intelligence. The initiative provides for the delivery of personalized diagnoses with recommendations for companies to adapt their journeys and be prepared for the new rules before charging for service messages comes into effect.
In Hi Platform's assessment, charging per message represents a natural evolution of the conversational market and tends to accelerate investments in artificial intelligence, review of flows and personalization of interactions. The expectation is that indicators such as resolution in the first contact, efficiency of journeys and the ability to automate processes in a contextualized way will increasingly influence the competitiveness of companies in a scenario in which talking better will be as important as talking more.
