look news india
New Delhi: WhatsApp has made customer service messaging free for businesses on its platform, making it the cheapest channel for enterprise communications. The move aims to increase AI chatbot interactions and increase its market share in India. This is currently occupied by traditional SMS. WhatsApp’s new pricing model aims to further grow India’s enterprise messaging market, which is worth around Rs 2,500 crore, according to industry estimates, with traditional SMS holding around 90% volume share with 55-60 billion texts per month . Whereas WhatsApp reportedly has 30% value share.
The organization representing India’s top three telecom companies – Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone-Idea – is the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI). In a letter to the Telecom Ministry, COAI has accused global technology companies like Microsoft and Amazon of using WhatsApp to send enterprise messages to customers.
The letter claimed that this is likely to cause an annual revenue loss of Rs 3,000 crore to both the Center and the service providers.
To counter WhatsApp, Google introduced an alternative mobile phone messaging system in the country, aimed at reducing WhatsApp’s hold on customer communications. Vodafone Idea (Vi) recently partnered with Google to offer Rich Communication Service (RCS) messaging to Indian enterprise customers.
Free WhatsApp Messaging for Businesses
It is noteworthy that this is the second time in six months that WhatsApp has cut the rates. In August, WhatsApp cut its prices for business messaging by 16-97% in various global markets to deal with increasing competition from Google’s RCS and Apple’s entry into the field. As per the June announcement, the price in India was reduced by 63%.