WhatsApp in the inbox

In short: WhatsApp messages arrive as tickets in Tickets and you answer them in the WhatsApp composer at the bottom of the ticket. That composer works like WhatsApp itself: plain text with formatting, Enter to send, emoji reactions to messages, recording and playing voice messages, and automatic transcription of received voice messages.

Where to find this

Open a WhatsApp ticket via Tickets. In the ticket overview you filter on WhatsApp with the WhatsApp channel button (on a computer). On a phone, the navigation at the bottom has its own WhatsApp button with a pre-filtered ticket list, as long as the organisation uses both email and WhatsApp.

Who: from the Agent role upwards (a Viewer can read tickets). The tickets belong to the organisation whose WhatsApp number is connected. Two settings in this article apply to the whole account and are found under Account > Account settings: the wait before analysis and the transcription of voice messages.

How messages end up in tickets

A new message from a customer ends up in a ticket in one of three ways:

1. If there is still an open ticket for this customer (any status except Closed), the message is added to that ticket. If several tickets are open, it is added to the one most recently updated.
2. If the last ticket is closed, it is reopened if the message falls within the WhatsApp reopen window (hours), measured from the last reply to the customer (or from the last customer message if there has never been a reply). This window is an account setting under Way of working: 24 hours for the Webshop profile and 168 hours for Service provider, unless the account has entered its own value (see Way of working: webshop or service provider).
3. If the message falls outside that window, a new ticket starts. The new ticket refers to the previous one.

For a contact set to Conversations per ticket instead of Continuous conversation (see the customer profile in the ticket), one extra rule applies: if the open ticket has not been updated for more than 24 hours, a new message starts a new ticket anyway, so that different subjects do not get mixed up.

Imported conversation history from the WhatsApp Business app (coexistence) is kept in a separate, closed ticket per customer. New messages never end up there.

Wait before analysis

On WhatsApp, customers often send several short messages in a row. That is why aishaa waits a moment after each incoming message before the AI analysis starts, so that consecutive messages are analysed together. Every new message from the customer restarts the wait.

The wait is an account setting under Account > Account settings, in the WhatsApp block: Wait before analysing WhatsApp messages (minutes). The value is between 0 and 10 minutes; the default is 1 minute. With 0, aishaa analyses immediately. The setting applies to all organisations of the account and can only be changed by an Account admin.

The WhatsApp composer

At the bottom of a WhatsApp ticket is the WhatsApp composer: a simple text field with the text Type a response…. Unlike email, there is no rich text editor; WhatsApp only supports simple text formatting.

The composer of a WhatsApp ticket with the toolbar with the formatting buttons Bold, Italic, Strikethrough and Code, the microphone button on the right of the toolbar, and an empty text field below it.

Toolbar

Formatting

WhatsApp only supports formatting with characters around the text. The formatting buttons add those characters for you; you can also type them yourself:

Received messages with this formatting are shown formatted in the ticket. A reply proposal from aishaa is automatically converted to this notation when it is sent.

Sending with Enter

• On a computer with a keyboard, a plain Enter sends the message. Use Shift+Enter for a new line.
• Ctrl+Enter (Windows) or ⌘+Enter (Mac) also sends, just as in the email composer.
• On a phone or tablet, Enter always adds a new line, just as in the WhatsApp app. Send with the send button there.

After sending, the cursor jumps back into the composer so you can keep typing. A WhatsApp message goes out immediately: the send delay that applies to email does not apply to WhatsApp. For more keyboard shortcuts, see Keyboard shortcuts.

Replying to a specific message

Open the three-dot menu on a message in the conversation and choose Reply. A small block appears above the composer with the sender and a preview of the message you are replying to. Click it to jump to that message, or click the cross (Cancel reply) to cancel. The customer sees your reply in WhatsApp as a quote of the original message.

Choice buttons of a template

If a template has buttons, you can always see what the customer can choose from:

• In the template picker and in the composer, the choices appear as chips below the preview text, so that you know before sending which buttons the customer gets.
• In the Review message dialog they appear as they do on the customer’s phone: with more than three buttons, the first two below the message and See all options below them, with the heading The customer can choose from: and all the choices in a row.
• Below the sent bubble in the conversation, the choices stay visible as chips. That is a snapshot of the moment of sending: if the template is changed later, this message keeps showing what the customer received at the time.

If the customer picks a button, that choice arrives in the ticket as an ordinary message, with the button text as its content. Because the choices stay below the sent bubble, you can see straight away what the customer chose from. A reply to a choice button counts as a message from the customer and therefore opens a new 24-hour window (see The 24-hour window).

Emoji reactions

Each message in the current ticket has a WhatsApp reactions button in its header. It opens a picker with these emojis: 👍 ❤️ 😂 😮 😢 🙏 😍 🥰 😊 😉 🤔 👏 🎉 🔥 ✅ 👀 💯 🤝. Choose an emoji to react; the customer sees the reaction in WhatsApp. If the message already has a reaction, there is an option at the bottom of the list to remove it.

Reactions appear as a badge below the message. You see the customer’s reactions to your messages in the same way. If adding a reaction fails, you see Reaction could not be added. Please try again.

You can only react to messages of the ticket you have open, not to messages of other tickets in the continuous conversation view, and not to a message that is still being sent.

A customer message in a WhatsApp ticket with the WhatsApp reactions emoji picker open and a message with a reaction badge below it.

Edited and deleted messages

If a customer edits a message in WhatsApp afterwards, the ticket shows the updated text with the notice Edited by the sender in WhatsApp below it. So you always see what the message says now, and that it has been changed. An edit can prompt a new analysis by aishaa.

If a customer deletes a message in WhatsApp for everyone, the message stays in the ticket with the notice Deleted by the sender in WhatsApp below it. That way the conversation stays complete and you can see that the customer withdrew the message.

Blank lines the customer types in their message stay in the ticket exactly as they were sent. A message with blank lines therefore reads the same in aishaa as in WhatsApp.

Sending voice messages

When the composer is empty, a microphone (Record a voice message) is on the right of the composer toolbar. As soon as you type text, the send button is there instead. That position is the same at every screen width. On a computer, the browser must have access to the microphone.

• On a phone or tablet, you hold down the microphone to record and release it to send (Hold to record, release to send). Slide sideways to cancel (Slide to cancel) or up to lock the recording (Slide up to lock), so you can lift your finger.
• On a computer, click the microphone to start. While recording, you see the time and a waveform.
• With a locked or desktop recording, you have the buttons Pause recording, Continue recording, Listen to recording, Delete recording and Send voice message.
• While sending, it says Sending voice message…. If it fails, the recording is kept so you can try again.

The voice message appears in the conversation as a Voice message attachment with a player. If transcription is on, your own voice message is transcribed too.

Messages if recording cannot start: Microphone access was refused. Allow the microphone for this site in your browser settings to record a voice message., No microphone was found., This browser cannot record voice messages. or The voice message could not be recorded.

The microphone is not available when the 24-hour window is closed; you then send a template (see The 24-hour window).

Receiving voice messages and transcription

A voice message from a customer appears in the timeline with an audio player. Below the player is the expandable Transcript with the written-out text and the note Transcribed automatically by aishaa; it may contain mistakes. The text is also used in the ticket overview, in search and by aishaa when writing a reply proposal.

A received voice message in the timeline with the audio player, the expanded Transcript and the note Transcribed automatically by aishaa; it may contain mistakes.

Whether voice messages are transcribed is an account policy under Account > Account settings, Policy block:

The help text for the setting says: The text appears under the audio and lets aishaa understand the message. Longer audio stays a download. The audio is sent to the speech service that aishaa uses. Only an Account admin can change this (see Policy: sensitive data and voice transcription).

If transcription is off, you only see the player and aishaa cannot include the content of the voice message in its analysis.

Photos, videos and files

Photos, videos, documents and stickers from customers appear in the conversation and in the ticket’s Media tab. A photo without a caption is shown as the photo itself, without accompanying text.

Attachments you send are subject to WhatsApp’s limits per file type: images up to 5 MB, video and audio up to 16 MB and other documents up to 100 MB. If a file is larger, the composer shows this on the attachment beforehand and aishaa sends the file as a download link instead of as media. You can read more about attachments in Files and attachments.

Read receipts and delivery status

• When the customer sees blue ticks is determined by the account setting Read receipts to the customer: when the ticket is opened, only when a reply is sent, or never. When aishaa reports the messages to Meta as read, the conversation with a coexistence connection also stops showing as unread in the WhatsApp Business app on the phone. Meta accepts such a read receipt up to 30 days after the message was received. See Account settings.
• You can always see whether the customer has read your messages, regardless of that setting.
• For every message you send, you see the delivery status: Pending, Sending, Sent, Delivered, Read or Failed. If sending went wrong, the Edit and send again button appears below the message.

If you send to your own WhatsApp number, nothing goes out and you see Not sent: this is your own WhatsApp number. WhatsApp does not allow sending messages to yourself from aishaa. A conversation with your own number does not create a ticket either. Trying again makes no difference.

Not delivered

Meta accepting a message is a receipt, not yet a delivery. Sometimes Meta reports a few seconds later that the customer did not get the message. Such a message is then a failed send, even though it first said Sent.

The bubble then shows the warning Not delivered: the customer did not receive this message, with the reason in plain language below it. These are the reasons you can see:

If the 24-hour window was the reason and this organisation uses a coexistence connection, the tip You can always reply from the WhatsApp Business app on the phone. appears as well. The app on the phone is not tied to that window. See Coexistence: the WhatsApp Business app and aishaa together.

A sent WhatsApp message in the timeline with the warning Not delivered: the customer did not receive this message, the reason below it, the Open the payment settings at Meta link and the Edit and send again button.

If only part of the message did not arrive

If you send text with an attachment, these go out as several WhatsApp messages. If only part of them does not arrive, there is an extra line: Only part of this message did not arrive. Sending it again also sends the parts that did arrive once more. Bear that in mind: the customer then gets those parts twice. Such a message is also never sent again automatically.

What happens to the ticket

• The ticket gets the status Error and goes back into the work queue, so that it does not stay marked as answered while the customer has heard nothing. See Ticket statuses and lifecycle.
• The colleague who sent the message gets a notification about it.
• The Edit and send again button appears below the message. It brings the message back into the composer. If it was a template, that template is ready again with the same values as the first time.
• aishaa only retries by itself when the refusal was caused by a throughput limit or a temporary problem at Meta. For all other reasons the message stays as it is until someone solves the cause and sends it again.

In the ticket overview there is no separate flag on such a ticket: the warning is on the message. You can find the ticket with the Status filter set to Error.

Messages from the WhatsApp Business app

With a coexistence connection, replies that a colleague types in the WhatsApp Business app on the phone also appear in the ticket, with WhatsApp Business app as the sender. Automatic greetings and away messages from the app appear as WhatsApp Business app (automatic); these do not count as a reply and do not change the ticket status. See Coexistence: the WhatsApp Business app and aishaa together.

Good to know

• You can only reply freely within 24 hours of the customer’s last message. After that the composer switches to template mode (see The 24-hour window).
• You cannot edit the text of a template in the composer. The choice buttons belong to the template, so you do not switch them on or off per message (see WhatsApp templates).
• If a message says Sent, Meta has accepted it. That is not yet a delivery: read under Not delivered what happens if Meta refuses it afterwards.
• There is no separate WhatsApp inbox: WhatsApp tickets sit among the other tickets in Tickets and follow the same statuses, assignment and filters (see The ticket overview: filtering, searching and sorting).
• Signatures only exist for email; no signature is added below a WhatsApp message.
• CC and BCC do not exist for WhatsApp.

Related

• The 24-hour window
• Coexistence: the WhatsApp Business app and aishaa together
• WhatsApp templates
• Replying to a ticket
• Ticket statuses and lifecycle
• The ticket overview: filtering, searching and sorting
• Files and attachments
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Policy: sensitive data and voice transcription
• Account settings
• Way of working: webshop or service provider