The core rule
The moment a customer sends your business a message on WhatsApp, a twenty four hour window opens. Within this customer service window, you can reply to the message with whatever text, images, documents, buttons or product cards you want no prior approval from Meta is needed. This customer service window exists to make sure that regular back and forth chatting does not have to use the pre approved marketing templates that a business would otherwise be limited to
What happens once the 24 hours are over
Forty eight hours after sending a message, if the customer hasn’t received a reply from your business, the twenty four hour service window will be shut. If you want to reply to the same message that triggered the customer service window, any message you send after the expiry of the twenty four hour window will require a pre approved template. There are three different categories that messages sent with templates can fall under, marketing, utility, and authentication. Each of those categories has different approval and billing requirements. In short, a reply that would have been completely free of charge inside the customer service window, would from outside the window onwards require a template and potentially incur charges
Why this can trip you up
The most common reason for accidentally sending a message without a template when one was needed is simply being unaware of the 24 hour rule. A customer sends a message in the evening, the message is seen by your team the next morning, and a normal reply is sent, which results in either an outright error or a message that was blocked by the system that requires a template instead. Teams using shared inboxes to reply to customer messages can be especially prone to the issue, as no one person is consistently following up on the same conversation, and hence no one person is aware of the state of any particular conversation window at any given time. Similarly, teams often forget that the 24 hour rule also applies to follow up messages. A team could reply to a customer’s message within the 24 hour window, and then attempt to follow up with another message two days later, with the customer now required to use a template.
How to use the 24 hour customer service window correctly
You should think of the 24 hour service window as the opportunity to reply to customer messages in whatever way you want to. The 24 hour service window is your chance to reply to whatever message the customer sent, answer whatever question the customer asked, get the customer to sign off on a sale or a complaint resolution. Anything that could conceivably be answered to within a 24 hours of receiving the customer’s message should be answered to directly and without a template. What cannot be answered to within 24 hours of receiving a customer’s message should be replied to with a template
A practical approach to thinking about the 24 hour rule is to it to think of it as a prompt to ask yourself the following questions:
- did the customer message me first
- is it within 24 hours of the customer’s message
- am i replying to them directly, or am i trying to initiate a conversation
- If the answer to all those questions is yes, i should reply without using a template, if the answer to any of those questions is no, i should reply using a template
Teams that are able to incorporate this rule of thumb to their day to day replies are far less likely to run into any issues with accidentally needing to reply with a template. For shared inboxes where multiple people are replying to customer messages, this means making sure that the team has the ability to see conversation windows and their expiry times in real time, as opposed to having to keep track of dozens of individual conversations and their state. That is a capability which should be carefully considered by any team that uses shared inboxes when interacting with customers.