Tech giant may let businesses contact customers through WhatsApp

At the F8 conference, Facebook announced its new Businesses for Messenger initiative.

As part of a larger plan by Facebook to make Facebook Messenger a platform all on its own, the company said it would soon let Messenger users communicate directly with businesses and brands for customer service enquiries and things like that.

It also seems Facebook is thinking of opening up the same functionality for its other massive chat network, WhatsApp.

According to a report by Bloomberg, Facebook CFO David Wehner said the tech giant was looking into ways to bring the business-to-consumer model of communication to WhatsApp.

"We think that enabling that [business to consumer] messaging has good business potential for us," said Wehner. "As we learn those things, I think there's going to be opportunities to bring some of those things to WhatsApp, but that's more longer-term than the near-term."

Wehner’s mention of this isn’t entirely surprising – the Businesses for Messenger initiative that Facebook announced earlier in the year is still just available to a select few companies in the US.