If you work with immigrants and refugees in Canada, chances are you're using WhatsApp to communicate with some of them. In this short video, I show you why you should consider moving to the WhatsApp Business app for your professional work.
Among other additional features, it's really the automated messages functionality that you'll find most useful. Like a vacation autoreply, you can set out of office messages, but you can set them for every day. Work 9-5 and want to maintain some boundaries in your work? Set your business hours, add an Away Message and your clients will still get a response from you, but it will give them some useful information, let them know when you'll be available to reply, along with any other information you want to provide.
This short video will show you how you can set this up and other suggestions. The video transcript is copied below.
WhatsApp has more information about using WhatsApp Business that you can read and watch on their site. In each help article there are specific steps to take, usually a video walking you through how to do it, and additional tips.
Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript of my video using Otter.ai. The transcript has not been edited. It may contain errors and odd sentence breaks and is not a substitute for listening to the audio.
Hi, and welcome to WhatsApp for business, I want to create this quick little message to show you exactly why WhatsApp for business might be useful for you in your work with your clients. So the biggest difference with WhatsApp for business is if you have a business profile, you can set away messages, greeting messages, and quick replies.
The business profile is where you would have your description information about you and the business hours, which is really crucial. And we'll get to that in the reply messages. But basically, once you've set your business hours, it allows you to create out of office messages, auto replies and things like that. So so you would go through and basically update and set a daily schedule for each day essentially. So you know, when you're open for, for business, more or less, the language here is business. But again, think about it as your own organization.
The away message I think is really crucial. This is like the auto reply, an email or a vacation message. But you can also schedule something, which is outside of business hours. So you can have a message that is sent every time which probably would get a bit annoying for you and your clients, but mostly the business hours. And this comes up in particular, when we're looking at boundary issues and helping clients understand when you're available, right digital messaging is 24, seven weeks back responses really quickly. But that's not realistic in the services that you provide. So this is a way to say I'm it's outside of our business hours, this is what's available to you.
And so you would create the description here, this is a very simple one. But you want to might want to create something that's more comprehensive. So if someone messages you at eight o'clock at night, the auto reply can say I'm not available right now, I will be back tomorrow at 9am or on a business day at 9am. So make sure they understand it's if it's the weekend, you're not available. So you can say I'm not available on the weekend, I'm Available from Monday to Friday, from 9am to 5pm. If this is outside of those hours, here are the different ways you can get help, here's 311211411911 or other numbers or links or information that you might want to provide to them to give them information about how they can access helps or services, or people even while you're not available, but also to reassure them that you'll be back the next day and you'll reply to their message then you can also decide who to send this to so everyone who sends you a message you can exclude your contacts. So maybe this is only for new people, you can decide to restrict it or to to select specific contacts. So you have some some, some flexibility here. The other thing that is the greeting message, which is for the first time somebody messages you or if they haven't messaged you in two weeks, as it says here after 14 days of activity, this is maybe a reminder message. And it can be similar to the to the away message or it can be a different kind of greeting Hey, thank you for reaching out. I'm so and so this is an opportunity to build a little bit of rapport to get give them an automatic message that tells them a little bit about you a little bit about the services you provide. And again, even reminding them perhaps of the boundaries. And when you're available. For example, quick replies can be really useful for for messages.
So what happens here is basically, if you are answering the same questions multiple times, for example, you can create these quick reply messages or canned messages. So this is the thanks message, for example. So if I'm in a chat, I just hit slash thanks. And it sends this longer message. And again, you can put as much or as little text as you want, as it says you can attach media with that that's an image or a PDF or a form or something like that. So if you're getting questions from people, where do I find x, y, and Zed? You know, where do I find how do I apply for my sin so you might have a slash sin, and it gives a detailed information about where they can apply it with a link or perhaps the form itself for example. So you can add a number of of quick replies that allow you to shorten the time so you're not constantly answering the same questions re typing, or finding or figuring out where to copy and paste a message from because you already have it right here within the business tools.
So those are really the most important pieces. I think you can kind of explore the rest of the app and but for me, that's a game changer in terms of being able to to remind people when you're available.