Viber Business Messages feature updates: May 2021

Viber is rolling out a new function with the help of which users will be able to send photos and videos to businesses. The new feature will help them to manage meaningful conversations with brands and easily solve ongoing issues: for instance sending their ID cards to authenticate themselves or terminate a registration. The function is already available to users who have updated their application.

Viber, one of the world’s most popular messaging applications, announces new functions that will allow businesses to serve customers better and give users an opportunity to chat with brands like they would with friends. Through this new function users can exchange photos, videos and GIFs with brands using Viber’s internal camera. This follows Viber introducing an option for users to share different types of files with businesses.

As part of this new feature, Viber has aligned the design of the business conversation page with the private conversation page that a user can have with their family and friends, by adding the camera and gallery buttons.

There are two ways for users to send documents, videos and photos to brands:

• From mobile device: by tapping on the “Gallery” button and then selecting photos videos, files for sharing from the internal phone gallery or using internal Viber’s “Camera” button;
• From desktop: by tapping on the button “+” and selecting pictures, videos, documents they need to send.

The new feature supports the exchange of the most commonly used types of photo (.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .bmp, .svg, .webp) and video (.avi, .wmv, .mov, .mp4, .3gpp, 3gpp2, .asf , .mkv, .mp2ts, .webm). The size of the video material should not exceed 100MB and the size of the GIF should not exceed 24 MB. For photo exchange there is no size restriction. In addition, the size of files that can be shared by users with brands has increased from 25 MB to 200 MB. All files shared by businesses and users are protected by encryption in transit.

The new feature has many use cases - for example, someone buying a new table in a shop can receive post-sales support without trying to explain via call if there is an issue with assembly, needing only to send video to a support chat with the business. Support specialists can now assist with technical problems via chat rather than having to book an in-person visit, which is very convenient especially for pandemic times. 

The announcement came a few months after Viber introduced another function designed to help customers to easily find brand chats they needed - the pin-to-top function, whereby a user can pin a business chat to the top of their chat list. To use all these functions users simply need to update Viber to the latest version.