Customer-initiated conversations

Consumers can reach out to your business on WhatsApp which initiates a 24-hour conversation session. Businesses can send non-message template replies (plain text, rich text, or media) during this 24-hour window. Typical use cases for customer-initiated conversations are customer support, status update inquiry, or chat banking.

Business-initiated conversations

Consumers can sign up to receive time-sensitive, urgent alerts like flight status changes, or multiple informational notifications like shipping order updates from a business. These are known as business-initiated conversations and they require the use of message templates.

Re-engagement conversations

These are any messages sent from a business to a consumer for the first time (or more than 24 hours after the consumer last messaged the business). This is a variation of the business-initiated conversation. All such messages are required to be a message template. Regular text messages or media messages (i.e. any non-message templates) attempted in this scenario will not be delivered to the end-user and an error will be returned by the Clickatell API. Typical use cases for re-engagement conversations include status updates on a support ticket after more than 24 hours after the consumer enquired or a confirmation of issue resolution after 24 hours.