Popular messaging platform WhatsApp announced today that it will be launching a new customer service app that will make it easier for businesses to chat directly with their customers.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook Inc., has announced that it will soon offer a new platform called WhatsApp Business. According to the company, a large number of small business owners were already using WhatsApp to communicate with customers, but the default app experience presented many challenges for this use case.

“We’ve heard stories of shopkeepers who use WhatsApp to stay in touch with hundreds of customers from a single smartphone, and from people who are unsure about whether or not a business on WhatsApp is authentic,” the WhatsApp team said in a blog post.

“In the coming months, we’ll be testing new features that aim to solve some of these challenges, and make it easier for people to communicate with the businesses they want to reach on WhatsApp. Our approach is simple – we want to apply what we’ve learned helping people connect with each other to helping people connect with businesses that are important to them.”

WhatsApp is currently running a closed pilot program for WhatsApp Business, which will be a free app targeting smaller-scale businesses. The company is also testing features for a more robust enterprise-grade platform that will be revealed at a later date.

So far, WhatsApp has shared little information about what actual features will be available through WhatsApp Business, but the company said the platform solves some of the problems that companies have faced when using the standard messaging platform to talk to customers. For example, WhatsApp Business offers a verified account badge to let users know that the business account they are talking to is genuine, and the app uses end-to-end encryption to keep conversations with customers private. WhatsApp said it’s also working on industry-specific features for enterprise customers, such as the ability for airlines to send out flight times or for ecommerce services to send out delivery notifications.

WhatsApp has not announced when its new service will be officially released, but the company said it will be listening to feedback during the test phase and will be “keeping people informed as we make these tools more widely available.”

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