Tech Desk 
Nov 21, 2024
An undated image of WhatsApp. — Freepik
WhatsApp is testing new methods for users to provide feedback to businesses about what kind of messages they would want to receive — or not receive, which includes buttons like “interested/not interested” and “stop/resume” for some particular categories of messages.
Meta stated that it will start testing interactions globally. Businesses can send messages through WhatsApp’s application programming interface (API) based on one of these four categories — marketing (offers, new products), utility (order updates, account balance), authentication (one-time passwords) and service (customer inquiries).
However, you might want to get purchase updates and authentication codes from an e-commerce site, but if you weren’t interested in marketing messages, you didn’t have the option to provide that feedback manually.
On the other hand, the company has been considering launching new controls for business messaging.
Meta Vice President of Product Management, Nikila Srinivasan stated: “One important thing we do is to give you transparency that you are interacting and engaging with businesses. Two, if you don’t want to interact with them, the strongest signal you can send is to block them and report them. This helps us understand that this is not a business you want on the platform. In addition, we are starting to think about how we can give more preferences to users to express more granularity.”
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Educating businesses and helping them understand how some of their campaigns are not meeting the platform or users’ standards will eventually reduce spam, Srinivasan added.
Previously, WhatsApp restricted the number of marketing messages a person could receive in a day without explicitly defining the limit.
For a long time, WhatsApp marketed itself as a place for people to have personal conversations. Over the last few years, the company has integrated new features to build and join communities, to broadcast messages as a creator or publisher, and, for businesses, to communicate directly with customers. Both communities and broadcast channels have their tabs in the app.
This change would allow users to opt out of marketing texts while continuing to receive utility, authentication, and service messages. Users will opt back in if they wish to get promotions from a particular business again.
