Your customers expect immediate response when using Whatsapp. However, not all businesses have 24/7 shifts. Wouldn't it be great if we could tell our customers automatically that they will be contacted soon?
In addition to that, Facebook expects businesses to reply to customers in 24 hours or less, for you to be able to send promotional messages. This process will solve that issue for you too.
For example, we may want to send this message when our customers contact us out of business hours:
Dear {{name}},
we are happy to hear from you :)
Right now there is nobody available for dealing with your query. We are only available Monday to Friday, 8:00am to 19:00pm.
We will contact you soon.
If you have the Whatsapp Connector by Respira installed, you can set up a trigger in Zendesk to send Whatsapp notifications that will send the message above to the client if she reaches us out of business hours.
The process is as follows:
- Create a Facebook template with the text above.
- Set up a Webhook in Zendesk pointing to our servers if you don´t have it already.
- Create a new trigger
- Set up the right conditions for the trigger
- Add an action that notifies the Webhook in the trigger
1.- Creating the Facebook template
Doing so is very easy. You need to create a new template under your WABI (Whatsapp Business) or Meta for Business account.
You must write down the template name, that will be used later.
Be aware that all templates need to be approved by Facebook in order to work. If your business is not related to pharma, gambling, crypto, weapons or the like, there should be no problem.
You can see the Facebook Template Creation process detailed with screenshots in this link.
2.- Create a new trigger
Just go to the Admin Center, and search for triggers. Then click on "Triggers".
Then click on Add trigger:
4.-Set up the right conditions for the trigger
We want our notifications to be sent when we are out of business hours. Therefore, in conditions, add:
- Channel Is WhatsApp
- Within Business Hours Is No
You can specify more actions if you need to, for example only new tickets, only for certain requesters, etc.
5-Add an action notifying the Webhook
You must notify the Webhook that is linked to the WhatsApp Connector (if you don't have it set up, here is how to do it).
You must send a POST request with the following data:
You need to enter the following data:
- ticket_id: {{ticket.id}}
- language: is a 2 letter language code, that corresponds to the language of the Facebook template you want to use. For example, ES is Spanish, EN is English, FR is French.
- template_name: It is the name of the template you entered in Facebook in step 1.
- messages[0][phone]: {{ticket.requester.phone}}. The phone number the WhatsApp message will be sent to.
- messages[0][ri_body_param_1]: The value of the variable in the body of the template, in this case the requester name.
You can optionally include the parameter add_to_queue: "true" if your trigger or automation may send many notifications all at once to your customers; if you don’t include it, you might get system errors and your users will not be notified.
You can see all the parameters that can be used by looking at the technical documentation here.
Making sure all WhatsApp messages are triggered.
In order for triggers to run, a ticket must be updated. Unfortunately, if a conversation with a client is open, then only the comments in the ticket are updated, not the ticket itself, and therefore the trigger won´t be triggered.
This is a Zendesk limitation, so there is no way to circumvent it. However, there is a workaround; you can set up an automation to solve all WhatsApp tickets opened in the day, so a new conversation will be open (and a new ticket with it) if the client replies out of schedule.
For example, if a WhatsApp ticket hasn't been updated after 24 hours, you can have an automation run and assign the ticket back to the group so that it will be listed again under the groups's unassigned queue/view
The automation conditions would be something like this:
Conditions:
- Ticket channel is WhatsApp
- Hours since created (business) is 8
Actions
- Ticket:status is Solved
Contact us
Contact us if you have queries about setting up this 24 hour notification workflow, or any other question related to WhatsApp, Zendesk, or our app.