WhatsApp Business gets quick reply, labels and more to its web and desktop apps

WhatsApp Business, a standalone application for business users created by WhatsApp completed one year of its launch today. The Facebook-owned entity claims that in last 12 months, the application has grown to over 5 million active businesses around the world.To mark the first anniversary, WhatsApp has launched three new features for the web version of WhatsApp Business which were previously available only on mobile. These include tools to organize and filter chats, as well as option to quickly reply to an inquiry made by a customer.[caption id="attachment_5509781" align="alignnone" width="1024"]

WhatsApp for Business[/caption]The quick reply option can be accessed by typing the '/' symbol into the text field. This will show up all quick replies saved until now. This feature works particularly well while replying to frequently asked questions by consumers.WhatsApp Business now also lets web users create labels for contacts or chats. Labels can be arranged in different colours for different chats like those who have new orders, pending payments, those who've cleared their payments and more.That's not all. Users of the app will now also be able to use filters for better search results. The filter button will appear on the search button. Here, users can filter out chats based on several conditions like unread messages, groups and broadcast lists.Another major change coming to WhatsApp Business this year is monetisation. Announced at F8 2018, Facebook said it would start monetising WhatsApp Business through ads. This would be interlinked with the main WhatsApp app where businesses will be able to show ads.Through these ads, users will be able to directly communicate with businesses. WhatsApp hasn't announced a launch date for ads on the platform as yet but that shouldn't be too far away.