Telegram founder Pavel Durov introduced Wednesday that users on the chat app with personal accounts can now convert them into business accounts by paying a month-to-month charge. This provides users the flexibility to checklist data corresponding to location and opening hours, which could be useful for small cafes and store house owners.
Some of the opposite options for business accounts contain organizing chats with shade labels, utilizing automated greetings or away messages, and shortcuts for fast replies. On his channel, Durov mentioned that Telegram plans to launch extra business options this month together with a approach to combine AI-powered chatbots for customer support.
“Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats. With AI, these chatbots can bring customer service automation to an entirely new level,” he mentioned.
Telegram is making an attempt to compete with WhatsApp Business, which crossed the mark of 200 million month-to-month lively users final yr, with these new options. However, a serious differentiation is that Telegram is charging a subscription charge to use business options, whereas WhatsApp depends on the kind of conversations and frequency of chats to generate income.
Meta-owned WhatsApp launched many business-facing options final yr together with personalised buyer messages and flows to full e-commerce transactions with out leaving the app.
Over the final two years, Telegram has centered on growing its business via premium subscriptions, self-custodial crypto pockets, and public sale of premium usernames. The chat app, which has greater than 800 million users throughout the globe, can be planning to launch its advert platform this month with a revenue-sharing program for channels.