Constraints and ambitions of WeChat for Business

WeChat for Business is famous enough to save tens of millions of yuan in marketing expenses for the marketing department each year, but few companies have used it and can use it well! For WeChat for Business, in addition to the unclear interaction logic of the product itself, high application learning costs, and lack of ecology, there are bigger problems waiting for them...

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Tencent's isolation

Half a month ago, perhaps no one could have predicted that this epidemic should have reached the turning point of the mid-game battle. The next step would be a nationwide summary, reflection and commendation. The heroic people of Wuhan should go out to the streets to enjoy the cherry blossoms and sigh at this beautiful and hard-won moment. However, our attention has shifted from the local part of China to the global situation. The epidemic began to rage everywhere, and different countries responded in different ways. The fact that the world is diverse is so obvious today. The fact that 60% of the people are infected and bring about "herd immunity" is shocking, and the U.S. stock market plummeted twice a week, which was called a new round of bear market roaring in. This time, it is not just the collapse of tourism, entertainment and offline businesses. This month, even the five major FAANG technology stocks that symbolize the hegemony and technological spirit of the United States have fallen by 30%, and the market value has evaporated by a total of US$416.6 billion. Of course, Chinese stocks are not immune. Alibaba's stock price has been discounted by 20%, and many Chinese companies listed in the United States have fallen sharply.

Tencent has only adjusted about 10% this month, and the epidemic situation of Tencent's gaming base represented by Honor of Kings has not been affected, and has even risen in the opposite direction. If you ask who holds the best cards at the Chinese Internet table today, it must be Tencent. Even the hottest Internet assassin ByteDance can hardly reach the crown of the giant because it does not have the cards of infrastructure. Not earning the last penny is Tencent's secret rule. WeChat's restraint has always been considered to be the reason for Zhang Xiaolong's obsession and the fact that it is big and can support ideals. Everyone applauds this approach of a national application, but it changes the appearance when it is put on WeChat for Enterprise in the enterprise service market.

Constraints and ambitions

Since DingTalk became free, the collaborative office industry has become a battlefield for giants. Enterprise WeChat Welink and Feishu have taken turns to enter the market. The paid players that used to live comfortably, such as Fanwei and Mingdao, have either stayed in a separate area to serve large customers or switched positions to focus on niche markets. In the past 5 or 6 years, the giants have continued to make a profit at a loss. Although DingTalk has won the most users and is firmly at the top of the food chain for government, enterprises and education; Feishu has made a beautiful blitzkrieg with the epidemic and has greatly increased its popularity, but the former is still far from profitability and the latter is still far from having a rich ecosystem.

WeChat for Business, which has the best chance of commercial success, has been following suit and has not made any progress. In the nearly 30 months since its launch in April 2016, WeChat for Business, the most famous IP in this land, has not made any splash. A large number of users have downloaded and installed it, but have been discouraged by its complex interactions, missing applications, and a series of restrictive usage rules. The abortion of WeChat for Business has dispelled the vision of completing office work in WeChat. In December 2018, the 2.7 version update connected WeChat users, and the concept of "more than just an internal software" quickly captured market attention. However, it was not until the end of 2019 when the 3.0 version was released that the industry market truly understood its product positioning and target audience, and took over Zhang Xiaolong's "people are service" pointed out in the open class at the beginning of the year - hoping to make every enterprise employee a window for enterprise services. People are service, and certified service.

From the promotional videos of WeChat for Business customer cases, we can see its lofty ideals. Retail formats, banking and finance, telecommunications and insurance, and other shallow-contact enterprises that connect customer scenarios with offline entrances account for the largest base of Chinese enterprises. The membership system and CRM only contain data, not real users. In the past, these enterprises purchased group control products for WeChat marketing, which were expensive and had a high risk of being blocked. Today, WeChat for Business should be the best choice. If people are the key nodes connecting WeChat users and services, then all e-commerce merchants can use WeChat for Business to complete the closed-loop service of purchased customers. WeChat for Business’s mini-programs can complete secondary sales and social fission. Combined with the recently launched live broadcast, Tencent is inadvertently attacking Alibaba’s headquarters.

However, Tencent's own constraints have made the simple concept of "people as service" become a wild hope. To this day, target customers other than professionals have not really realized the advantages of WeChat for Business. The market voice is not loud enough and the coverage is not enough. It is still difficult for trial companies to independently complete the use of WeChat for Business by all employees. Even if Tencent has provided a large amount of subsidies to mobilize service providers to dig deep, the past results have been extremely small. OA office software is still the perception of most customers. As a collaborative software, it is indeed not easy to use and cannot compete with DingTalk's first-mover advantage and huge investment. A collaborative document does not use the mature Tencent document, but develops a set of micro documents that increase the learning cost of users. The slow product iteration of WeChat for Business, the product planning tearing between Tencent's various business units, the product traces deliberately restrained for fear of becoming a "micro-business tool", and the investment of only 300 people in the team all provide a strong footnote for the criticism of WeChat for Business today. Zhang Xiaolong once said that 100 million people in China teach him to make products every day. Perhaps we know that there are some things that they can't do or don't know how to do, but they are just unwilling to do it and unwilling to do it now.