Shared Inbox

When someone replies to your WhatsApp message — a campaign, a template, an OTP — that conversation needs to land somewhere your team can answer. The Shared Inbox is that somewhere. This guide covers the basics: who sees what, how to assign work, and how to keep response times sane.

How conversations get to the inbox

Anything inbound — replies, new messages from numbers in your contact list, even reactions — appears in Inbox. Conversations are grouped by the recipient phone number, so if a single person sends three messages they appear as one thread.

The inbox shows three tabs by default:

• Open — active conversations someone needs to handle
• Snoozed — temporarily hidden, will reappear at a future time
• Closed — resolved, kept for history and search

Each open conversation shows the recipient's name (or phone if no name is set), a snippet, the last message timestamp, and a pill showing assignment.

The 24-hour session window

This is the single most important concept in the inbox.

When a recipient sends you a message, you have 24 hours from that message to reply with free-form content — any text, any media, no template required. This is called the customer service window.

After 24 hours of recipient silence, the window closes. To message them again you must either:

• Send an approved template (Templates), or
• Wait for them to message you again, which reopens the window

The inbox shows a countdown timer on each conversation. When it turns red you have under an hour. When it expires, the reply box switches from free-text to a template picker.

Assigning conversations

To stop everyone replying to the same thread, conversations get assigned to one team member.

You can assign manually (open the conversation → assignee dropdown → pick a teammate), or configure assignment rules:

• Round-robin — distribute evenly across available agents
• By segment — VIP segment goes to senior agents, general goes to the pool
• By language — Hindi conversations to Hindi-speaking agents, etc.
• Unassigned on close — release the assignment when the conversation closes so the next inbound is a clean slate

Unassigned conversations show a yellow indicator. Anyone on the team can pick them up.

Canned replies

For the responses you type over and over — order status checks, return policy questions, hours-of-operation — set up canned replies.

Go to Settings → Canned Replies → New and create:

• A shortcut — what you type to trigger it (e.g., /hours)
• A body — the actual response

In the reply box, type / to see your shortcuts, pick one, send. You can include variables that pull from the contact ({{name}}) or the conversation.

Internal notes

Notes are messages visible only to your team — recipients never see them. Use them to:

• Hand off context: "Spoken to twice already, wants a refund — please process"
• Tag teammates with @name to notify them
• Log decisions for future reference

In the reply box, switch the toggle from Reply to Note before sending.

Tags and conversation properties

Tag conversations to help reporting and segmentation later. Common tags teams set up:

• support, sales, billing — by topic
• vip, enterprise — by customer tier
• bug-report, feature-request — for product teams to track

Tagged conversations can be filtered, exported, and used to build dynamic contact segments.

Reply with templates (after the window closes)

When the 24-hour window has closed, you'll see a Send template button instead of the text input. Pick the template, fill in variables, send. This counts as a new conversation in WhatsApp's pricing model.

For high-volume teams, set up a small library of "re-engagement" templates designed for exactly this case — "Hey, following up on your last message, are you still looking for help?"

Snooze and close

• Snooze — temporarily hide a conversation until a specific time. Useful when the customer says "I'll get back to you tomorrow."
• Close — mark resolved. Closed conversations stay searchable and reopen automatically if the recipient messages again.

Workflows for common team setups

Small team, single queue

• Skip assignment rules
• Everyone watches the open tab
• Use notes liberally to avoid double-handling
• Close aggressively to keep the open list short

Larger team, specialised roles

• Set up assignment by tag or segment
• Build canned reply libraries per role
• Use the analytics view to spot agents with overlong response times

After-hours / overnight

• Configure an out-of-hours auto-reply template (Settings → Automation)
• This sends once per conversation per business day
• It is itself a template and must be approved

Inbox performance metrics

The dashboard shows team-level metrics:

• First response time — how quickly the first human reply goes out after an inbound
• Resolution time — from inbound to close
• Conversations per agent — load distribution
• CSAT (when surveys are configured) — recipient satisfaction

Use these in your weekly team retro, not as real-time pressure cookers.

What's not yet shipped

• Voice messages on inbound — currently transcribed to text automatically; native voice playback is on the roadmap
• AI-suggested replies — in design
• Cross-channel inbox (Instagram, FB Messenger alongside WhatsApp) — planned for the channel expansion

Next steps