Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Reaching customers first on WhatsApp is possible, restricted, and easy to get wrong in a way that costs the channel.
What it takes
- An approved template for what you want to say.
- The customer's number, obtained with their agreement.
- A reason they will recognise.
- A way to send, and this is the part that decides the project.
Truly proactive contact, to somebody who has never written to you on WhatsApp, cannot be done with a macro from a ticket. Zendesk states it plainly: you cannot use the template shorthand for end users who have never reached out to your business. That route is the Sunshine Conversations Notification API, which means a build. It also decides your plan: reaching out proactively needs Suite Professional or higher, and so does the API key it runs on. Below that the route is closed, whatever the templates say.
Reaching somebody who did write to you and has since gone quiet is the easy case, and that is a macro on the existing ticket.
Consent is not optional
WhatsApp expects people to have agreed to be contacted there. A number scraped from an order form is not consent, and messaging it produces blocks and reports, which lowers your template quality and eventually your ability to send at all.
Ask, record that you asked, and honour it when somebody says stop.
What works
- Order and delivery updates the customer is waiting for.
- Appointment reminders.
- Following up on a conversation they started.
All of these are things the recipient wants. That is the test.
What does not
Anything the recipient did not ask for. WhatsApp is a personal space, and a message there is felt differently from an email. The reaction to an unwanted one is not indifference; it is a block.
What it costs depends on the category
Proactive messages are marketing templates, and those carry a cost per message. Utility templates inside an open reply window are free today, but that is not the case you are in when you reach out first. From 1 October 2026 more of it becomes chargeable, including ordinary replies inside the window. Either way it is a genuine constraint on volume, and a reason to be selective rather than sending because you can.
Planning proactive WhatsApp? Talk it through with us first. Getting consent, categories and templates right at the start is far easier than recovering a damaged quality rating.
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