BookMyShow becomes the first Indian Online Ticketing brand to partner with Whatsapp in its Whatsapp for Business pilot programme. It has partnered with WhatsApp to make a confirmation channel for all its 1 billion users.
After this partnership, users who will be booking tickets on BookMyShow will receive a message on WhatsApp with the confirmation text and a M-ticket QR Code.
“WhatsApp has definitely become a preferred mode of communication for millions of people in our country and we could identify tremendous value in making it a default ticket confirmation channel. We have already started rolling out this feature and over the course of next few weeks, we aim to scale it to cover our entire user base,” Ravdeep Chawla, Head of Product, BookMyShow said.
Whatsapp earlier announced in its Blog post, as reported by Pixr8 that how it is testing its beta version over windows phones. With it’s 1.3 billion monthly user database, it will be a tremendous opportunity for small businesses to reach out to people and integrate it in their services just like BookMyShow.
The Facebook-owned company recently announced that it will start showing verified profiles, the ones containing a ‘green badge‘ next to their names, for some businesses like banks, airlines, etc to customers in a move to bring their services directly to the chat app.
“WhatsApp will also let you know when you start talking to a business via yellow messages inside a chat. There is no way to delete these messages from the chat,” WhatsApp said in a blog post.
Behind The Curtains
BookMyShow also shared the info about how Whatsapp for Business will work on the backend. With the partnership done, Whatsapp will be providing two APIs to the company- Send and Receive API.
With the help of these API, BookMyShow will be able to know whether the user is available on Whatsapp, if yes, the tickets will be sent on that account otherwise, they will send an SMS, just like they are doing it now.
However, users will not be able to communicate with the company on BookMyShow; any messages sent will redirect the user to BookMyShow’s support page.
Whatsapp will also offer the company an analytics dashboard where they can keep an eye on the messages being passed through.
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