During the Conversations event on May 19, 2022, Meta announced that it would open the WhatsApp Cloud API to all businesses. This means that the WhatsApp Business API is now available to all businesses, regardless of size. With WhatsApp API, even small mom-and-pop shops can scale their customer communications and provide delightful customer experiences.

What is WhatsApp Cloud API?

WhatsApp Cloud API is a cloud-hosted version of WhatsApp Business API that allows businesses to send and receive messages. WhatsApp Business users can now use the new Cloud API hosted on Meta’s services to implement the WhatsApp Business API without incurring the cost of hosting on their “own servers.”

Businesses can scale their customer communication and reduce the go-live date from months to minutes by providing accessible, secure, cloud-based hosting. WhatsApp Cloud API enables enterprises to build directly on their regular WhatsApp, allowing them to customize their user experience and improve the response speed.

What features are available?

WhatsApp has worked hard to make customer-business communication more seamless. They are constantly releasing new features and tools to improve communication between these two parties.
To continue improving communication, WhatsApp has made its WhatsApp Business API available to all businesses by hosting it on Meta’s cloud servers. Some of the features that companies can look forward to are listed below.

• Businesses and developers can build on their WhatsApp to cut down start-up time.
• WhatsApp Cloud API users can eliminate the hosting costs of WhatsApp Business API.
• Businesses can handle the influx of chats by managing them across devices (up to 10 for now).
• WhatsApp will provide customizable click-to-chat links to help businesses increase their online presence and attract new customers.
• Companies get access to new features as and when they are made available.

What is the pricing for new features?

WhatsApp Cloud API gives WhatsApp Business users a slew of new features. Meta has stated that with the newly launched WhatsApp Cloud API, businesses are not required to pay the hosting fees that are typically associated with the WhatsApp Business API.
Regarding pricing for other features, WhatsApp stated that they intend to offer more advanced features to WhatsApp Business app users. These features will be available as an option. That means users can choose whether or not to use it. If the user decides to use these features, there will be a fee for their new premium service. The pricing for the new services is yet to be announced.

Businesses that use WhatsApp Cloud API must pay for each message sent or conversation, according to the rules. Exchanges are classified into two types:

• Business-initiated
• Customer-initiated

What does it mean for WhatsApp Business users?

WhatsApp Business users can keep using their WhatsApp Business app or the WhatsApp Cloud API to host their services for free on Meta’s cloud servers. WhatsApp believes that few small businesses will grow over time and require additional tools to support their users. In that case, they should be able to continue using the free service, i.e., WhatsApp Cloud API.

What’s the difference between WhatsApp On-premise and Cloud API?

Businesses using the WhatsApp API will now have two hosting options: on-premises and cloud API. The key differences between these two are listed in the table below.

What are the limitations of WhatsApp’s Cloud API?

Businesses use WhatsApp API to improve their user experience and connect with more people. However, WhatsApp is just one of many channels through which users can communicate with businesses. Businesses can automate their customer communication on WhatsApp using the WhatsApp Cloud API.

Users nowadays prefer other communication channels, such as Instagram, websites, and even voice (automated phone service). Businesses can integrate all communication channels in one place and get a unified view of all customer queries using WhatsApp Business API via BSPs such as Surepass.io.

Aside from that, Surepass.io (WhatsApp’s partner in providing the WhatsApp Business API) offers additional services that improve a customer’s experience with the WhatsApp chatbot that are not available through the WhatsApp Cloud API. These are some examples:

AI-powered FAQ:

Use the power of Surepass.io’s Conversational AI to automate frequently asked questions, which has been trained on over 4 billion queries with various intents and utterances.

Agent Assist:

Gain access to features such as a unified customer profile view, canned responses, and other tools that assist agents in saving time and being more efficient when resolving customer queries.

Dashboard:

Use our dashboard and reports to track the real-time performance of your bots and agents. View how users interact with your bot to learn how to improve its performance.

Send out a large number of proactive messages to your customers. Use triggered messages, notifications, alerts, updates, and reminders to engage and re-engage users.

Please speak with one of our experts to learn how you can get started with Surepass.io right away.