WhatsApp 24-hour rule

Chat for Jira Service Management allows you to set up integration between Jira and your WhatsApp Business Platform. Your customers can reach out to you via WhatsApp messages, and your Support Team will be able to handle such tickets directly in Jira Service Management.

To be able to communicate with customers using WhatsApp messages, you should understand how the WhatsApp Business Platform works. 

What is WhatsApp 24-hour rule?

Let’s talk about WhatsApp Conversation Types first. Currently, the WhatsApp Business Platform supports sending two types of messages:

• User-initiated: A conversation that initiates in response to a user message. Whenever a business replies to a user within the 24-hour customer service window, that message will be associated with a user-initiated conversation. Businesses can send free-form messages within this 24-hour customer service window.

• Business-initiated: A conversation that initiates from a business sending a user a message outside the 24-hour customer service window. Messages that initiate a business-initiated conversation will require a message template.

According to the WhatsApp Business Policy, if a person initiates a chat with you, you can continue that conversation for up to 24 hours after the last message sent to you by that person. Outside of the 24-hour window, you can only send approved Message Templates via WhatsApp Business Platform.

How it works

Businesses and users can exchange any number of messages within a 24-hour conversation session.

If you fail to reply within 24 hours, you can’t reply to the customer until they send another message, reopening the 24-hour window. The 24-hour period restarts every time the customer sends a message.

At the moment, sending Message Templates is not supported by Chat for Jira Service Management. We are in the process of gathering users' interest in this feature and investigating the technical feasibility of handling the current WhatsApp limitation. 

If you know that you may not be able to respond to your customers within 24 hours, we recommend that you use Jira Automation to set up an auto-reply to prompt the user to respond to activate a customer service window and inform them of the possible delay.

Example automation rule

The rule demonstrated below checks if:

1. The last comment on an issue was made by the "Anonymous Chat User."

2. More than 20 hours have passed since that comment.

If both are true, it adds a new comment to the issue, indicating how much time has passed (in seconds) since the last comment.

Step 1: Trigger setup

Open

Step 2: Condition setup

Open

Step 3: Condition setup

Step 4: Action setup

Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or need further information.

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