“We’ll evolve Messengeras atruecustomercare channel in 2018,” he added, underlining the findings of a Facebook-commissioned study by Nielsen, where 56% of the people surveyed said they would rather message a business than call customer service and 67% areexpected to messagebusinesses even more over the next two years. This year, the company wants to make Messenger a platform for customer care, said David Marcus, VP for messaging products at Facebook. According to Facebook, which owns both WhatsApp and Messenger, video chat and voice calling took off in a big way in 2017. However, the pace of growth of chat app users may not be as fast as India’s expanding smartphone market because several people still do not have internet access, Ovum said. Of this, WhatsApp alone has the largest share of over 200 million. The number of monthly active users of chat apps in India will likely reach 320 million by 2020 from about 230 million in 2017, according to Ovum. While WeChat, Line, Viber and others have started operations here, they have not been able to make it as big as Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp. The growing number of internet and smartphone users makes India a massive opportunity for messaging apps. ![]() ![]() While the spokesperson said it was too early to share monetisation plans, sources said the platform may charge for additional capabilities in the future.īy sheer numbers alone, India is the largest market for WhatsApp. “No matter how the product evolves, this will always guide our product decisions”. The WhatsApp spokesperson said that the platform is focused on building a simple, reliable, and secure messaging app. So, they will have to come up with something unique to also make sure that revenue generation remains a sustained model,” said Faisal Kawoosa, general manager of research and consulting at Cybermedia Research. “Chat apps will have to do much more to increase customer stickiness while realizing that they’re easily replicable (by other apps). To be sure, the biggest challenge is to find a niche and easily usable service which can differentiate one messaging platform from the other, and help monetise the services. Kolla added that commerce, payments, marketplaces, cab-hailing, entertainment and media consumption were the larger revenue pies outside messaging. “Payments and digital commerce are crucial to the expansion of the chat app into a platform as it enables revenue generation for the chat app and secure seamless payment experience enables customers to trust the chat app and engage more with the platform,” Dharia said. WhatsApp is also gearing up to launch payments in India and is integrating its digital payment platform with banks. Just being messaging apps that offer free services is not going to be a strong revenuegeneration model,” said Jayanth Kolla, founder of Bengaluru-based research firm Convergence Catalyst. “Every technology company is vying for consumer stickiness, interaction and time spent on the app, and in order to keep them within the app’s ecosystem they’re broadening themselves to become platforms. Whatsapp Business is a separate app from Whatsapp Messenger, aimed largely at giving a direct communication platform to small businesses, many of who may be using WhatsApp already. We want to make business messaging more convenient for people and more efficient for businesses,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said in response to ET’s questions. “Based on research, we know that people are using WhatsApp to talk to businesses. “Chat apps are moving away from being simply a provider of communication tools (chat, voice and video) to becoming a platform for the exchange of services, payment mechanisms and content consumption.” WhatsApp, the largest messaging app in the world with 1.3 billion monthly active users, introduced a business version in India early this week. “The very reason chat apps are expanding beyond communications is to create a sustainable monetisation strategy,” said Neha Dharia, a senior analyst with a focus on messaging at London-based research firm Ovum. For now, WeChat’s rivals outside China including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Viber and Line are behind the curve on this front, although some have started on the road to becoming larger platforms.
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