India is a market where people and businesses often lead with behaviours that one can learn from and productise, Nikila Srinivasan, vice president of business messaging at Meta, told Moneycontrol in an interview.
"I engage a lot with Meta's India team, as well as with businesses and partners operating in the country...It’s a useful market to get a pulse check on how business messaging evolves, because in some ways, it is simply a way of life here. It's not that obvious to someone who lives in the United States," Srinivasan said.
She cited the recently launched business calling feature as an example of this phenomenon. "We were hearing from people in the market for a long time saying, ‘Hey, we already do this — can you make sure it works well for us at scale?'. So, we listen to a lot of feedback, and then we observe how people and businesses are interacting and what they’re doing today, and we try to productise that," she said.
On July 1, Meta announced that large businesses using the WhatsApp Business Platform will soon be able to receive calls from customers who want to speak to someone live, or place a call themselves after a customer requests one. Small business accounts using the WhatsApp Business app can already chat with customers via voice.
India, one of the largest markets for paid messaging globally, is central to Meta's business messaging ambitions, which have become a strategic priority as the company seeks to reduce its reliance on digital advertising. In recent quarters, WhatsApp Business has emerged as a notable revenue driver for the social networking giant.
In April, during the company's earnings conference call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg remarked that "business messaging should be the next pillar of our business".
India, which is WhatsApp's largest user region with over 500 million users, is also a 'helpful market' to understand how to roll things out, iterate and get early feedback, Srinivasan said.
For instance, while the calling feature was piloted with businesses around the world last year, Meta especially paid attention to feedback from India, she said.
Apart from India, Srinivasan added that markets such as Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia also show a similar trend where business messaging has taken off in a significant way.
WhatsApp's monetisation push
In recent years, Meta has made a significant push to monetise WhatsApp, the company’s most expensive acquisition to date, which now has over 3 billion users worldwide. It has built two major business lines - Click-to-WhatsApp ads and paid messaging.
Click-to-WhatsApp ads, which is a multibillion-dollar revenue source, enable businesses to place a call-to-action button across Facebook and Instagram that, when clicked, opens a conversation thread with the business on WhatsApp.
Meanwhile, through paid messaging, Meta allows medium-to-large businesses and enterprises to send users various categories of messages including marketing, utility, and authentication messages.
Starting July 1, WhatsApp began charging businesses on a per-message basis instead of per-conversation, as part of its efforts to simplify pricing and make it consistent with other channels that also charge per message.
The company has also updated its utility and authentication rates across several markets, including India.
This change is expected to significantly increase the monthly bills of businesses using the paid messaging feature.
That said, WhatsApp has introduced volume tiers with lower rates for these categories. Additionally, utility messages sent in response to a user's message within a 24-hour window are now free.
Srinivasan said "The spirit of these updates is to encourage great messaging experiences for your customers, while still driving predictability for your business."
A fortnight ago, Meta also announced that it will introduce ads to WhatsApp in the coming months, through the Updates tab.
The company plans to expand access for businesses to buy paid messaging in more places. This includes shared buying in the firm’s Ads Manager tool, introduced at the event on July 1. Last year, WhatsApp began allowing small businesses to send paid messages through the WhatsApp Business app.
As adoption of WhatsApp's business offerings increases, the volume of unsolicited promotional and spam messages has also risen, and the issue continues to grow.
Srinivasan said WhatsApp is rolling out better controls that allow users to indicate they do not want to receive promotional messages from a particular business. The company is also making an explicit push to reduce the number of such messages users can receive, she noted.
"They've always had the option to block or report a business that they believe shouldn't be on our platform and we've been deliberate about taking action on that feedback. We're also looking into ways to continue using those inputs and signals from users," she said.
Meta is also leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise message delivery, so that people receive only the messages they are likely to want and read, Srinivasan said.
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