Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher |
| Access | Agent |
Each platform limits what you can send and when. Those rules belong to them, and they explain most agent frustration.
Before any of it: what you need
Social channels come with every Suite plan from Team upwards. On Support they are an addition: you need Support and Chat with the Social Messaging add-on, which is worth establishing before anybody designs a workflow around them.
The reply window
Every social platform limits how long after a customer's message you may reply freely. WhatsApp gives you 24 hours; Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct each give you seven days. Past that window, a normal reply no longer reaches the customer.
Both platforms show it the same way: the composer is blocked and the agent cannot type into the conversation at all. An agent staring at a conversation they cannot reply to is looking at this rule rather than at a fault.
On WhatsApp a countdown in the composer tells you how long is left before that happens, and the same countdown appears on the conversation preview in the ticket list.
Neither is a fault, and there is nothing to configure.
What that means in practice
- Answer social conversations promptly. They are not email.
- Do not park them on hold for days. The window closes while you wait.
- Where a conversation will take time, move it to email or ask for an address before the window closes.
What you can send differs too
Attachments, formatting, images and message length are all limited differently per platform, and those limits change. A reply that works in the web widget can be rejected on WhatsApp for being too long.
Starting a conversation
Generally not allowed. Replying to somebody who contacted you is fine; messaging somebody first is restricted, and on WhatsApp it requires an approved template.
Anyone planning proactive outreach on social should establish what is permitted before designing the campaign.
Set expectations with agents
Most of this reaches your team as apparent bugs. Ten minutes explaining that these are platform rules saves a great deal of time spent looking for a Zendesk setting that does not exist.
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