Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
You write and submit a template in the interface of your WhatsApp Business account, not in Zendesk. Meta approves or rejects it, and that takes anywhere from one minute to five business days. Zendesk has no part in that decision and cannot speed it up.
You need templates because of the 24 hour rule: you can reply to a customer freely within 24 hours of their last message, and after that only an approved template gets through.
Create one
- Open your WhatsApp Business account and start a new template.
- Choose the category WhatsApp asks for.
- Write the text, using {{1}}, {{2}} and so on for the parts that change per message.
- Add a real sample value for every variable, parameter and any media. WhatsApp rejects a template submitted without them.
- Submit it and wait for the result.
Write it so it stands alone
The recipient may not remember contacting you, and a template that opens with "As discussed" reads as a stranger's message. Name your business, say what the message is about, and make the next step obvious. This is also what a reviewer judges, so a template that is clear to a customer is the one most likely to be approved.
Before you send proactively
You need opt in permission from the person first, and that opt in has to name your business clearly. After that, WhatsApp keeps a quality rating on your templates over a rolling 24 hours, based on how recipients respond to them.
If that rating drops or the status of your number changes, Business Manager sends you an email and a notification, and your status changes to flagged or restricted. That is the real cost of sending templates people did not want, so keep the set small and use each one for the case it was written for.
One thing to know afterwards
The content of a template message is not rebuilt inside the ticket after you send it. The ticket records that a template went out, but an agent reading the ticket later does not see the text the customer saw. If that text matters for the conversation, put it in an internal note.
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