What you supply
Your account team will ask for a short set of onboarding details before activation begins — your company and contact information, and optionally a display picture for the WhatsApp Business profile. Getting these right up front avoids rework later.What gets set up for you
Your account is created and entitled for WhatsApp before you are involved: the account itself, its users, the channel configuration, and billing. Link tracking is also configured at this stage if your campaigns will use shortened URLs. See URL click callbacks for the data it returns.Embedded signup
This is the step that needs you. It is a single session of about thirty minutes, scheduled in your timezone, where your WhatsApp Business Account is created and your number verified with Meta. The number you verify becomes your WhatsApp Business number. Choose it deliberately — moving to a different number later means repeating verification.If signup fails, the error usually comes from Meta rather than OneXtel. Meta documents the
common causes for
business account creation,
WhatsApp account creation,
phone setup,
and phone verification.
Your business profile
Once the number is verified, your WhatsApp Business profile is configured from the artefacts you supplied. This is what customers see when they open a conversation with you, so it is worth supplying good material rather than placeholders.Opt-in and opt-out
WhatsApp requires customers to be able to opt out of messaging, and configuring this is part of activation. Two decisions are yours. Which categories opt-out blocks. Opt-out can suppress Marketing, Utility, or both. Decide this deliberately — it determines whether a customer who opts out still receives service messages such as order confirmations, or nothing at all. Which keywords customers can use. Keywords are case-insensitive.
Keep the standards unless you have a reason not to — customers try them by habit, and a keyword
nobody guesses is the same as no opt-out at all.
Opt-in can also be scoped to specific message types, or left unscoped so it applies to
everything. You can manage opt-in and opt-out programmatically once live — see
Opt-in / opt-out API.
Acceptance testing
Before handover, three things are verified end to end:1
Template creation
A template is created and submitted for approval.
2
Template trigger
An approved template is sent to a real number and arrives.
3
Report population
The send appears correctly in reporting, with its delivery status.
Handover
At handover you receive your portal URL and credentials, plus the documentation set: the WhatsApp Campaign user manual, the Templates and Send Message API guide, and Meta’s message template category guidelines. Training sessions are scheduled at the same time.Credentials are sent to individual recipients only, never to a shared or group address. Change
your password on first sign-in — see Account settings.
Adding conversational features
Standard activation covers messaging, templates, campaigns, automation triggers, and reporting. If you also need chatbot capability — conversational AI, automated response flows, context-aware conversations — or live agent handling with bot-to-human handoff, an agent dashboard, queue management, and multi-agent routing, these are an additional layer on top of the base setup. Raise it during the kick-off call, since it changes the scope and timeline of onboarding.Next steps
Create your templates
Understand the categories before you write.
Launch a campaign
Build and send your first campaign.
Register callbacks
So delivery reports and replies reach your systems.
Connect a plugin
Send from Salesforce, MoEngage, LeadSquared, and more.