Meta on Thursday announced it was launching its Meta Verified program for WhatsApp Business users in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Colombia, with the intention of expanding to more countries over time. Subscription plans for this service begin at $14 a month.
The company is also adding new features to its business messaging service and allowing companies to use their APIs to service customers over calls inside of the app.

Meta launched verification for creators in March 2023 and for businesses in September 2023. So far, the program was only available for Facebook and Instagram.
 
 Businesses that opt in to the plan on WhatsApp will receive a badge and impersonation protections after sharing their business's information with the company. Businesses will get a verified WhatsApp channel for their marketing in return.

And, of course, businesses will be able to access their WhatsApp Business account on multiple devices. However, they get to create a custom web page with details about their business that they can share with customers or vendors.

Some of these features WhatsApp already offers with WhatsApp Premium, which it started testing with some businesses in specific regions last year but didn't expand into other markets.

Meta is also introducing the ability for users to call large companies using WhatsApp through APIs — think banks or an airlines. From the user's end, this will work like calling a number for customer support, except in the app. Up till now, users of WhatsApp Business had to use their personal phone numbers to service customer calls.
WhatsApp said it would charge companies money for this capability, but hasn't given the details on the pricing yet.

Focus on businesses
Moreover coming in is the personal messaging service for businesses where the merchants would be able to send messages to their customers, such as coupon codes, news about new launches, or even birthday wishes.

Meta is attempting to build a full suite of solutions that businesses can tap for communicating with their customers, now reportedly topping 200 million monthly users on WhatsApp Business. Meta separately said it is launching new AI-powered tools for automated customer support and ad creation today.

Since Meta introduced this Click-to-WhatsApp ad option, it has been very profitable for the company. The founder had said during 2023 that these ads have a $10 billion annual run rate and are growing. An India-based logistics company, Shiprocket, has also seen positive results for merchants.

Click-to-WhatsApp ads, recently introduced, are giving sellers another channel of marketing even more effectively and a return on ad spend as high as 3-4x will further spur transactions and engagements on the platform Praful Poddar Chief Product Officer at Shiprocket, to TechCrunch.

Meta last year focused on building shopping experiences within WhatsApp, but is today focusing on messaging and customer support-related features since this is one of the important cash drivers for the company.

The firm's CFO, Susan Li, said in its Q1 2024 earnings call that its family of apps brought in revenue of $380 million, mainly driven by business messaging on WhatsApp.

According to a new study released by Meta with Bain & Co, the company said there is massive opportunity for conversation commerce in India since only 200 million people out of 650 million users active on social media and messaging platforms shop online. Existing commerce and payment services service the top 200 million users only, it said. With over 400 million users in the country, the company sees a huge opportunity getting more merchants on board and facilitating shopping for the rest of its user base with WhatsApp.