WhatsApp & inbox

The problem this actually solves

Most small businesses that sell through conversation have the same setup without ever deciding on it: one WhatsApp account, on one employee's phone. It works until it does not, and the failure modes are predictable.

• The person with the phone becomes a bottleneck, and the business stops when they are on holiday.
• Nobody else can see what was promised to a customer, so a second conversation starts from scratch.
• When that employee leaves, the customer history leaves with them — on a device you do not own.
• There is no answer to "how many enquiries did we get last month" beyond scrolling.
• Nobody can say how long anyone waited for a reply.

A shared inbox inside the CRM fixes all five at once, but the reason it works is not the inbox itself — it is that the inbox and the customer record are the same system. A separate shared-inbox product solves the first three and leaves you integrating it with your CRM forever.

Which channels are supported

You connect your own WhatsApp Business number — the number your customers already have. More than one number can be connected, which is how branches, brands or languages are usually separated, and each number has its own distribution list of agents.

Instagram and Messenger run through the official Meta integration, so conversations from your business profile land in the same place as WhatsApp rather than in a second tool.

What happens when a message arrives

The sequence is fixed and takes well under a second:

1. The message is written to the conversationIncoming and outgoing messages share one thread per contact per channel, with a badge showing which channel it came from.
2. The sender is identifiedThe phone number is normalised to international E.164 format and matched against existing contacts, so the same person is not created three times because they were saved differently.
3. A lead is created if the sender is newAutomatically, with the message thread already attached — before anybody has opened the CRM.
4. An owner is assignedIf the conversation has no owner, it is handed out round-robin among the users you assigned to that specific channel, atomically so two agents never receive the same one.
5. The owner is notifiedIn-app notification, with the unread badge updating live — the inbox polls for changes every couple of seconds rather than waiting for a refresh.

Replying is the mirror image: you answer from the conversation and the message goes out through the same channel and the same number it arrived on. That sounds obvious, but it is a common bug in multi-channel inboxes and produces the confusing situation where a customer messages one number and gets an answer from another.

Working in the inbox

The screen is a conversation list on one side and the thread on the other, with the linked lead visible alongside it. The things teams use most:

Send images, not just text

Photos, documents and price lists can be sent from the inbox, with an inline preview in the thread. For retail, real estate and automotive this is most of the conversation.

Views and filters

Unread, mine, unassigned, by channel — saved as views so each agent can open the one that matches their job. Conversations are paginated rather than loaded endlessly, which keeps the screen fast on a database with six figures of contacts.

Assign and reassign

A conversation can be handed to a colleague, which also transfers the lead ownership so the record and the conversation never disagree about who is responsible.

The lead panel beside the thread

Stage, score, custom fields and recent activity next to the conversation, so you can update the record without leaving the message you are answering.

Automations on inbound messages

From the Growth plan, an incoming message can trigger a rule — auto-assign by keyword, tag the lead, create a task, send a templated first reply.

Who sees which conversations

The inbox obeys the same permission model as everything else, which is worth stating precisely because "shared inbox" and "everyone sees everything" are not the same thing.

Visibility follows ownership and the department hierarchy: an agent sees conversations they own, a manager sees everything owned by their branch, and an administrator sees all of it. Conversations that have no owner yet are visible to everyone, because somebody has to be able to pick them up.

This is what makes the inbox usable in a company with several branches or brands in one workspace. The Istanbul branch does not read the Ankara branch's customer conversations, but head office reads both, and none of that requires separate accounts or separate databases.

Measuring response time

Because first contact and first human reply are both recorded, response time is a real measurement rather than something reconstructed by scrolling. It is calculated in working minutes against each person's shift calendar: a message that arrives at 23:40 and is answered at 09:12 the next morning counts as 12 minutes, not eleven hours.

That distinction matters, because the alternative — raw elapsed time — punishes teams for being closed and makes the metric something people argue with instead of act on.

The reason to measure it at all is that it is the most researched number in lead management. A Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 companies found that contacting a lead within an hour made a meaningful conversation with a decision maker seven times more likely than waiting one hour longer. The same study found the average company took 42 hours and that 23% never replied.

Source: Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”, Harvard Business Review, March 2011.

WhatsApp Business vs. the Business API

This is the question that confuses almost everyone evaluating a shared inbox, and the terminology does not help. There are three different things called WhatsApp:

The free Business app is designed around one phone held by one person. It has catalogues and away messages, but it cannot give five agents a shared view, cannot enforce who owns which conversation and cannot write anything to a customer record. The moment a second person needs to answer, you have outgrown it.

The Business Platform — commonly called the API — is what makes a shared inbox possible. It is also what makes conversations survive a staff change, because the history lives in your database rather than on a handset. On yearly plans from Growth upward, the messaging allowance for this is bundled for the first year.

One practical consequence worth knowing in advance: a number can be connected to either the Business app or the API, not both. Moving an existing number across is a one-way step, so most teams either move deliberately at a quiet moment or start the API on a second number and forward.

Moving your team off personal phones

The technical connection takes an afternoon. The habit change is the actual project, and it fails in one specific way: a transition period where half the conversations are in the shared inbox and half are still on somebody\'s handset. That period produces the worst of both worlds, because now nobody knows where to look.

1. Connect the number before you announce anythingGet messages flowing into the inbox and confirm replies go back out correctly, with two or three people testing, before the team is told to change anything.
2. Set the distribution list firstDecide who is in the rotation for each number on day one. If ownership is undefined, the old "whoever sees it first" habit simply reappears inside the new tool.
3. Switch everyone on the same dayNot gradually. A hard cut-over is uncomfortable for a week and correct forever; a gradual one is comfortable for a week and wrong for months.
4. Watch the response-time report for the first fortnightIt tells you immediately whether the change worked. If the number goes up rather than down, the distribution list is wrong or somebody is still answering from their own phone.

Honest limitations

Two constraints are imposed by the platforms rather than by us, and it is better to know them before you connect than to discover them afterwards.

Instagram contact names. Meta only releases a sender's profile name under consent rules, and only for a limited period after the person writes to you. A conversation can therefore appear initially as a generic Instagram user, and the name is resolved when the person messages again. This is a platform policy, not a missing feature, and it affects every tool that integrates with Instagram Direct.

WhatsApp messaging windows. WhatsApp Business rules govern when you may message someone who has not written to you recently, and what a message outside that window may contain. Replying to an active conversation is unrestricted; proactive outreach follows the platform's template rules.

Beyond those, the inbox does not read personal WhatsApp accounts — it connects a WhatsApp Business number, which is what the platform permits and what keeps the connection stable.

Which plan includes what

The shared inbox is on every plan, including Starter — you connect your own number and manage two-way conversations inside the CRM. What changes higher up:

Yearly plans from Growth upward include a year of unlimited WhatsApp messaging. Additional WhatsApp numbers are available as an add-on, and an SMS gateway is a separate add-on at $39/month. See the pricing page for the full comparison.