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Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced on Wednesday that users of the chat app who have personal accounts can now convert them to business accounts by paying a monthly fee. This gives users the ability to include information such as location and hours of operation, which can be useful for small cafes and shop owners.
Some other features of business accounts include organizing chats with colorful stickers, using automated greetings or remote messages, and shortcuts for quick replies. Durov said on his channel that Telegram plans to launch more business features this month, including a way to integrate AI-powered chatbots for customer service.
“Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as invisible secretaries to answer all or some of your chats. With AI, these chatbots can take customer service automation to a whole new level.
Telegram is trying to compete with the WhatsApp Business application, which exceeded 200 million monthly active users last year, with these new features. However, the main difference is that Telegram charges a subscription fee to use business features, while WhatsApp relies on the type of conversations and frequency of chats to generate revenue.
Meta-owned WhatsApp introduced several business-facing features in the past year including personalized customer messages and flows to complete e-commerce transactions without leaving the app.
Over the past two years, Telegram has focused on growing its business through premium subscriptions, a self-custodial cryptocurrency wallet, and an auction of premium usernames. The chat app, which has more than 800 million users worldwide, also plans to launch its advertising platform this month with a revenue-sharing program for channels.
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