New Delhi: WhatsApp has launched Bharat Yatra, a pan-India campaign to enable small businesses in India to grow by teaching them how to use WhatsApp’s tools for better customer engagement and digital growth.
The program began in the Delhi-NCR region with a special WhatsApp-branded bus visiting popular markets such as Laxmi Nagar, Rajouri Garden, Nehru Place, Malviya Nagar, Amar Colony, and Safdarjung Enclave. After Delhi-NCR, the bus will go to other business hubs like Gurgaon and Noida, visiting places like Sapphire Mall and Atta Market. It will also go to cities like Agra, Lucknow, Kanpur, Indore, Ahmedabad, Surat, Nashik, and Mysore in the coming months.
WhatsApp aims to empower small and medium businesses (SMBs) through on-the-job training. Live demos will be combined with one-on-one support for the process of setting up a WhatsApp Business profile, creating a product catalog, and even designing ads that will lead to a WhatsApp chat. According to Ravi Garg, Meta India’s Director of Business Messaging, small businesses are integral to the economy of India, and when given proper digital tools, they could become drivers for India’s digital growth.
Other recent features on WhatsApp are focused on assisting businesses in earning customers’ trust and engaging better with their customers. For instance, Meta Verified enables businesses to send messages like appointment reminders and offers. The business app by Meta is testing AI to streamline interactions with its customers.
This new initiative has followed WhatsApp’s earlier program WhatsApp Se Vyapaar with the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) to train 10 million traders. That is over 481 million downloads of the WhatsApp Business app in India, and no doubt, WhatsApp is actually putting a lot of focus on the support of small businesses in India.
