• The Meta subsidiary aims to make WhatsApp a more comprehensive platform for businesses to engage in ‘conversational customer care’
• To that end, Meta is making WhatsApp corporate and utility messaging free to Indian enterprises and has launched a cloud-based WhatsApp hosting service
• But the move is facing pushback from India's telco community

India’s enterprise messaging sector has been thrown into a spin following the decision by Meta-owned WhatsApp to make its customer service and utility messaging services free to enterprises in the country from 1 November 2024, a move that will tempt businesses away from the SMS services provided by Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea. 

For Meta, the move is an important step in its messaging market share battle with the telcos,  but it also enables the big tech giant to try out the potential of ‘conversational customer care’.

CCC (as it will no doubt be called) is a strategy to use chat, automation and human interaction to create a “personalised and contextual experience” for customers – especially in a sales environment. Meta plans to do this by offering the messaging element of CCC for free to its corporate users as they interact with their customers via WhatsApp’s multifunctional programmable messaging platform. Meta hopes that corporate customers adopt and pay for access to the WhatsApp messaging platform in order to conduct their customer-cuddling activities.

However, this development is not something that India’s telcos are going to let pass without a struggle.

In India, as elsewhere, the bulk of B2C customer interactions are still undertaken using traditional SMS messaging, though in recent years the new generation digital messaging players, including WhatsApp, have been growing their messaging market shares.

With WhatsApp’s assault on the corporate messaging market, Meta might be poised to  gobble up an even greater share of what the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) estimates is a market worth around 25bn rupees ($296m) market. The COAI has been lobbying to thwart WhatsApp, arguing that its free messages move might severely disrupt the Indian telecoms industry.

But the telcos can see the writing on the wall and know they need to up their game and now just rely on traditional SMS services to meet business users’ needs. Vodafone Idea has already teamed up with Google to offer Rich Communication Service (RCS) messaging to Indian enterprises customers: It announced that move in February this year, and while “industry insiders” have been predicting that Jio and Airtel will follow suit, there is no evidence of that just yet. 

In the meantime, the Indian authorities are keeping a close eye on WhatsApp: According to 

Reuters, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) has forbidden WhatsApp to share user data for advertising purposes with other Meta-owned applications for five years, a ruloing that Meta is contesting. It also fined Meta $25.4m over antitrust violations related to the messaging application's 2021 privacy policy.