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. Chat is that somewhere: a WhatsApp Web-style inbox, shared by everyone in the workspace, backed by live data rather than a periodic sync.

How conversations get to the inbox

Anything inbound lands in Chat in the sidebar. Conversations are threaded per contact, so three messages from one person are one thread, not three.

Someone who messages you and isn't in your contacts yet is created as a contact automatically and badged Unknown. That is deliberate — you can reply immediately, and tidy up their name and details later. Bear it in mind before a campaign: Unknown contacts usually have a phone number and nothing else, so a template with a {{name}} variable will look wrong for them.

Finding a conversation

The thread list has a search box and two filters:

• All — every conversation
• Unread — only threads with unread inbound messages, with a count badge

Each row shows the contact's name (or phone if you don't have one), the last message, its timestamp, and an unread badge.

The 24-hour service 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 the customer service window.

The conversation header shows how long is left on the window, in green while it's open. Once it closes it reads Window closed in amber, and the composer replaces the text box with a template picker — because outside the window, an approved template is the only thing WhatsApp will deliver. Sending one opens a new billable conversation.

After 24 hours of recipient silence the window closes. To message them again you must either send an approved template, or wait for them to message you, which reopens it.

What you can send

From the composer:

• Text, with emoji
• Approved templates, via the template drawer, filling in any variables before sending
• Attachments — images, video, audio, documents
• Replies — quote a specific earlier message for context
• Reactions — emoji on an individual message

Outbound messages carry delivery ticks the same way WhatsApp does, so you can see at a glance whether something was sent, delivered, or read. Opening a thread sends a read receipt back to the customer, and typing shows them a typing indicator.

If you have a product catalog set up, you can also send product messages straight into a conversation — see Product Catalog.

Contact notes

The right-hand panel shows who you're talking to, and lets your team keep notes on that contact — context that the customer never sees. Use them to hand off: "Spoken to twice already, wants a refund." Notes live on the contact, so they follow the person across every future conversation rather than being trapped in one thread.

When the AI agent is involved

If the AI Agent is switched on, it answers inbound messages within the rules you set and steps back when it isn't confident or the customer trips a handoff keyword. A conversation the agent has been handling carries a banner at the top of the thread, so whoever picks it up can see what the customer has already been told before replying.

Working as a team

The inbox is genuinely shared: everyone in the workspace sees the same threads and the same messages, updating live. What that means in practice:

• Agree who takes what out loud. There is no assignment feature yet, so two people can open the same thread. A quick convention — by topic, by shift, by first-responder — avoids double-replies.
• Use contact notes to hand off, so the next person doesn't restart the conversation.
• Watch the window timer, not the unread count. A thread with 20 hours left is fine; one with 40 minutes is the one to answer now.
• Restrict who can reach settings. Agents who work the inbox rarely need billing or the WhatsApp connection — see Team & Settings.

Reply with templates after the window closes

When the 24-hour window has closed, the composer offers the template picker instead of the text box. Pick the template, fill in its variables, send. This counts as a new conversation in WhatsApp's pricing model and is billed accordingly.

For teams doing this often, keep a small set of "re-engagement" templates approved and ready — "Hey, following up on your last message, are you still looking for help?" — so you're never waiting on Meta approval at the moment you need to reply.

Not available yet

Worth knowing before you build a process around them:

• Conversation assignment — no assignee, and no round-robin or rule-based routing.
• Snooze, and open/closed states — threads are filtered by All and Unread only; a conversation is never "resolved", it just goes quiet.
• Canned replies / saved responses — approved templates are the closest thing today.
• Conversation tags — tagging lives on contacts, not on threads.
• Out-of-hours auto-replies — the AI agent is the only automatic responder.
• Inbox analytics — no first-response time, resolution time, per-agent volume or CSAT. The dashboard reports message and campaign delivery, not team performance.
• Voice-note transcription — inbound audio plays as audio; it isn't transcribed.
• Voice and video calls — not offered by the WhatsApp Business API at all.

Next steps