This month’s focus has majorly been on introducing new features and enhancements into the Team Inbox module, along with few enhancements to our Broadcasts and Chatbots module and the usual bug squashing.

New feature updates

🔁 Automatic chat assignment

Eligibility - Business plan customers

With this release we have introduced the ability to automatically assign chats to users within a team in a Round Robin manner.

A new Default Action setting is available under the Automations section, named “Assign newly opened chats in round robin manner within users of the assigned team”

When this setting is turned ON, incoming chats would get assigned one by one to the users that are online and belong to the team assigned to the chat, saving time and effort for Team Inbox Admin users who had to perform this action manually earlier.

This setting is useful for cases where chats are not handled by chatbots or keyword responses and are handled manually by agents. 

In addition to this, we have also added this ability to our Chatbots (previously Automation flows). 

While setting up  the “Assign team” node in the chatbot, users will have an option to choose Round Robin assignment. When chosen, the chat will get assigned to the team specified and will be assigned to each agent of the team one by one. 

To learn more about this feature, please refer to our support article: https://support.wati.io/l/en/article/3z1ja6j33q-assign-chats-to-your-agents-in-round-robin-style

🤖 Accepting media files in Chatbot flows

Eligibility - All customers

This has been a highly requested feature - you can now accept different media files in your Chatbot flows! In the past, Wati Chatbot can process only text-based responses, now we are expanding it to images, videos and documents.

We also give you the ability to validate the file type. This means if you are expecting an image, but your contact uploads a video, the Chatbot can ask your contact to try uploading again. Simply toggle on “Advanced options” and pick which file type to validate for and customize your fallback message.

The file name can be captured in flow variables, which you can export to a Google Sheet or save into the contact’s custom attributes for reference later. If you are handling lots of media files at scale, you can download the media files using our /getMedia API endpoint.

Enhancements

✉️ Updated UI for adding attachments on Team Inbox

The current UI for sending attachments to a conversation in Team Inbox did not convey the limitations about the file types and file sizes that can be accepted as per Meta’s Whatapp API specifications. We heard this feedback from our customers and have improved the UI to ensure users can find all the relevant information about these limitations while they choose to send attachments.

⚡️ Speeding up chat loading on Team Inbox

Nothing makes us happier than seeing your business grow! The number of messages and conversations on Wati have been growing rapidly this year. We have been working hard on improving the chat loading speed in Team Inbox, so you can easily dig up old conversation anytime. We also have many more improvements coming up to make your experience on Wati as speedy as possible, so stay tuned!

🌟 Brand new broadcast

Our broadcast just got a glow up! You can also filter out your broadcast audience to send out more targeted and effective broadcasts.

🛍️ Shareable Catalog link made available in Catalog Setup page

Now once the Catalog is connected with Wati, the Catalog link will be made available in the catalog setup page as shown below.

So now once the Catalog gets connected with Wati, you can Scan the Scan code or click the Catalog link below to view your Catalog in Whatsapp. You are also provided the option to share the Catalog link too.

🌸 More festival ready template samples

As promised, we’re back with more samples for all the upcoming festivals! We have samples for children’s day being celebrated in Brazil and for all the mega sales events happening in October for India. They’re available as ready to use drafts too.

Head on over to your templates page, pick a sample of your choice to kickstart your campaigns!

💚 If you like what you see, show us some love by hitting the like button!

Festival season is here 🎉 and we hope our product updates give you a few more reasons to celebrate 🥳

TLDR version

💬 You can now reply directly to specific messages in Team Inbox chats

💅 Brand new rich text editor for templates

🌸 Festival ready template samples

⚡️ Faster broadcasts

🔽 There's a new button to jump to the bottom of long chats

👕 Showcase your catalog better with item variants

📈 Enhancements to API’s, automation and broadcast templates

🐞 Oh, and we squashed some pesky bugs too!

🎁 New features

💬 Ability to reply in context to customer messages

Team Inbox users can now reply in context to a particular incoming message from the customer. They can select the 3 - dot menu for a particular message and select the Reply option and type in and send the reply message.

Note: This functionality is only available on Wati web currently and will be made available in the Wati Mobile App soon.

💅 Rich Text Editor for Templates

You can now easily format your template to make it extra ✨stunning✨

Use our rich text editor to add emojis, special formatting to your text & see how it will look to your end customers in our preview box!

It also supports keyboard shortcuts, which makes it extra handy when you’re busy creating templates.

🌸 Festival ready template samples

As festival season is approaching, we’ve got some ready made templates for you 🎆

Try it out for yourself by going to our templates page and clicking on “new template message” → choose “use a template”

They’re also available in draft status for your ease

Psst.. keep an eye on this page because we’ll keep updating new samples for you 👀

⚡️ Faster broadcasts

We hear you about our broadcast speeds and we’ve worked on making it faster. With this update, you can get your festival campaigns out in a jiffy 💨

🔽 Jump to the bottom of a chat

We have added a button to allow users to quickly scroll down to the bottom of a chat. The chat will no more scroll automatically to the bottom when a new message is received. 

If the user is scrolling through the earlier messages and a new message is received from the customer, there will be a notification dot shown on the scroll icon.

Also, when the user clicks on the scroll icon, there will be a visual indicator to show which messages are new in the chat. 

👕 Supporting Item Variants in catalogs

Wati catalog customers will now be able to showcase item variants to their end users. The items having variants in the catalog would be displayed category wise as shown in the image below.

📈 Enhancements

WATI API enhancements

• When sending a template message via API, you had to include an empty parameters array in the payload even if your template did not require any parameters. We have improved this now, such that the empty parameter object is not needed if your template does not contain any parameters.
• In use cases where you need to send different template messages at the same time to the same new contact, you would have to introduce a small artificial delay in calling the WATI API to avoid the occasional failed messages. Now, we have improved our conversation creation and /sendTemplateMessage API’s ability to handle multiple templates sent to the same new contact.

Keyword Action updates

• The matching method “Contains” will now be able to trigger a chat assignment to a team or a user.

🐞Bug Fixes

Duplicated conversations due to missing country code

• Previously, if you added a phone number without a country code for broadcasts, a corresponding conversation would be created in Wati using that phone number without country code. However, when the contact replies, the incoming message would be tied to a phone number with a country code and a separate conversation would be created. The mismatching phone numbers (e.g. 1234567890 vs +91 1234567890) led to duplicated conversations for the same contact.
• Going forward, we will address this issue by merging contacts whose phone numbers match the same WA IDs (WhatsApp’s standardized format for phone numbers) in order to avoid any new duplicated conversations.
• Please note that WhatsApp always recommends including a country code when sending messages.

Catalog messages in Flows

• Some of the individual product and product set messages were not sending out when they are being triggered via a flow. This was due to a sync issue with Meta and has been fixed.

Frequent webhook failure email notifications

• We have reduced the frequency of email notifications sent to you when your webhook added to Wati has been failing to accept message events we push.

Team inbox experience on mobile browsers

• There were a few UI issues that were hampering the overall user experience of Team Inbox on mobile browsers, such as few buttons and dropdowns getting cut, navigation issues etc. and the same have been fixed.

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💚 If you like what you see, show us some love by hitting the like button!

We’ve made a few tweaks to our UI 👯

Navigation bar updates

We wanted to allow you all to have more space when creating broadcasts or interacting with customers so we’ve minimised the navigation bar but kept all your favourite things still accessible

• Access settings from the side profile; so you can update your profile
• Buy credits when you click the $ sign
• Be notified of the state of your WABA account when there’s any issues

Bug Fixes

Support centre on sidebar

By default, the support functionalities will show (especially for new accounts). You can set to show this by going to “Settings” → “General” → “Support button enabled”

Ability to export chats

Previously an upgrade to professional plan pop up would show (even if you’re on pro plan) we’ve updated this now so you can export all the chats you wish

Updated WhatsApp account status

Fixed the ability to view updated status of your WABA account by giving you the latest updates of it

(p.s. this is an admin access feature)

This month we bring to you CTWA insights, UX improvements and bug fixes to make your Wati experience delightful 🙌🏿

🎁 New feature launch - CTWA insights

Eligibility - Professional plan customers

Last month, we launched the ability to identify customers who have interacted with your Click to WhatsApp ads. Our latest release - CTWA insights, will help you see how your ads are performing. You will find all the important metrics - impressions, clicks, ad spends, etc. to help you understand and compare ad performance to make smarter decisions on where to spend your marketing money.

But wait, you can find this information on Facebook ads manager too - so what’s the big deal really?

CTWA insights will also provide data about

• the contacts that have interacted with every ad. This information can be exported and businesses can run more targeted marketing campaigns for these contacts.
• carts received for every ad if the business is using WhatsApp’s catalog functionality.

These 2 metrics are a good start for our customers to understand the impact of their ads on revenue. We will be adding more insights soon.

If you’re new to CTWA, here’s a guide to help you get started 🤗

Feature Upgrade - Chat button

We’ve recently upgraded our branding and we think the Wati chat button deserves the makeover too! With the new chat button,

• you can choose to show the CTA always or not
• The CTA is also clickable (and not just the button)
• snazzy new design which will make your customers want to click on the chat button and start interacting with your business

You can upgrade to the new experience on the Shopify/Woocommerce page or generate the code here. More about the chat button here.

🪄Making Wati easier to use

Several people are typing…

If you’re a multi agent team, you can now see who else is typing on the chat, giving you time to move on to the next query and making sure there aren’t too many people on one chat.

WYSIWYG for template messages on Team Inbox

Now you can get an accurate view of how the templates look to your users and what steps they took.

View broadcasts sent for dates of your choice

You may now choose a custom date and click “apply now” to generate the data/ reports.

View document name and caption in Team Inbox

Document name and caption will both be visible now for documents on Team Inbox. Earlier only the document caption was visible. 

Making it easier to use multiple Hubspot accounts on Wati

If you have more than 1 Hubspot account and choose one on Team Inbox, we’ll remember that selection for you when you switch between conversations on the Team Inbox page.

🐞Bug fixes

• We had a bug on team inbox filters when tags were being selected - this is now fixed.
• While assigning a conversation to an operator via the routing automation, the previous teams assigned to that chat were getting lost. This has been fixed.
• Embedded Team inbox view will now display an error message if a user is trying to send an unsupported file type in the chat. Users can also view the supported file types from the link added.

• Earlier, users were not able to search using special characters on Team Inbox. This has been fixed and users will either see the search results of an empty state if no matching results are found.
• If a user had insufficient credits and used the /sendtemplatemessages APIs to send a broadcast - it would return a successful result which gave the wrong impression to users that the broadcast was successfully sent. We’ve now fixed this and the API will return “Not enough credits” in the response.
• Previously when broadcasting to a large number of contacts (10k+) via Hubspot, sometimes duplicated messages would be sent to customers. We have now fixed this issue.
• Previously when exporting large number of contacts (100k+), the progress bar might get stuck and the export would not complete. We have now fixed this issue to facilitate larger exports.

We have a bunch of new commerce related updates for you this month, and a new rate card for your conversations that enables you to optimise your business messaging!

Major Update:

• New WhatsApp Business API Pricing Model: We have made some important changes in response to WhatsApp's pricing model update for WhatsApp Business API Accounts. The new pricing took effect from June 1st, 2023. For more detailed information about WhatsApp's related updates, please refer to the link provided https://www.wati.io/blog/whatsapp-business-conversation-based-pricing-2023/.

  How do I learn more about this?

  For more information and assistance, you can refer to our support article - https://support.wati.io/l/en/article/ykon2mvshd-whats-app-pricing-update-new-conversation-categories

New Features:

• Catalog Order page: Now get to see all Catalog orders you receive from customers in one place. 

  

  Help Article: Orders page to display Catalog orders - WATI Knowledge Base

  
  

• Contact Attribute for Catalog orders: Introduced two new contact attributes last_cart_total_value & last_cart_items which gets created when you receive cart orders from customers. 

  With the inclusion of these contact attributes now, you can enable the collection of online payment for catalog orders, segment catalog users on purchase intent and many more.

  

  Help Article: How to collect online payment for catalog orders using Razorpay payment gateway - WATI Knowledge Base

  
  

• Edit Catalog Message: Edit the description content of your Catalog message from your WATI environment itself.

   With this option now, you can display your preferred content in the description area of your catalog message.

  

  
  

• Catalog Checkout Flow Template: Configure a checkout flow for your catalog orders using our pre-built Checkout flow template and collect customers' addresses, payment modes & make sure that the order is placed.

  

  
  

• CTWA Feature Add on: Now you can get to see which all customers have engaged with your Click to Whatsapp Ads (CTWA) from the Wati team inbox itself and also filter & segment CTWA customers.

  

  Introduced two new contact attributes, source_id & source_url, which gets created when a customer interacts with the CTWA Ad, and the two attributes will contain the Ad id & Ad URL values. 

   Note: The CTWA feature is available for only Pro plan customers 

  
  

• One Time Password Button for Authentication templates: Have introduced the option to create Authentication templates with One time password buttons for all Non-Indian Businesses

  Note: For Indian businesses at present One-time password buttons for authentication templates are not allowed and will continue with the present template creation procedure.

  
  

• Enhanced WATI Dashboards: We have modified the "Total Conversations" graph in WATI Dashboards to provide more information and added the ability to filter conversations by the new Conversation Categories - Marketing, Utility, Authentication, Service & Referral. This enhancement allows you to gain better insights and manage your conversations more efficiently.

These changes aim to ensure a seamless transition to WhatsApp's new pricing model and provide you with additional functionalities and insights in WATI Dashboards. By adapting to the new pricing model, you can continue using WhatsApp Business API without any disruption. The enhanced dashboard features empower you to analyze your conversations more effectively and optimize your messaging strategy.

Bug Fixes & Minor Updates:

• Account details page: You can now see a summary of your account information and make any changes. This is where you can now go to view your invoices, check your payment details, etc.

• Easy cancellation: We now allow you to cancel your Wati account with no hassles. We know many of you have multiple accounts with us that you use for various campaigns, so wanted to make it easier for you to onboard AND offboard specific accounts.

  
• User management: Many of you use the product for marketing and sales, and we wanted to make it more friendly for you and your team, and have now renamed "Operators" and "Agents" to "Users" to be more inclusive! Continue to show us the love 🥰

• Visibility of “Add” button under the Reply Material section has been corrected.

  

PS: We now have a brand new website and logo, do check it out here and let us know your feedback!

If you have any questions about our new features, please feel free to message us at support@wati.io.

This is a tiny but impactful update!

• We updated our template categories to follow Facebook's new policy. Now templates created from Wati can be either of these 3 categories below. Along with this, we have already submitted all your old templates to be slotted in these three categories, and you should be able to see all the new categories for each of your templates!

• Psst.. We also fixed some small bugs to improve Wati’s overall experience. Let us know if you feel the difference :)

Mobile updates:

• Product messages are now shown in the mobile app.

  

This one is a big one, so buckle up!

New Features and Enhancements:

1. Team Inbox: Now shows a tool-tip message for chat expiry timer

2. Broadcast: Clearer error messages are now shown against each contact so you know why your broadcast failed for these contacts

   

3. Broadcast: We removed the check WhatsApp Number Validity Status when importing contacts, as this is not supported by WhatsApp any more

   

4. Broadcast: New feature that allows you to edit the template content of "Rejected" and "Paused" templates and resubmitting, instead of starting from scratch!

   

5. Broadcast: We have cleaned up our UX to show relevant messages on Broadcast, Expired & Solved chats so you are not confused about the three, and know exactly what can be done next for those chats.

   
6. Contact: Improved the import and export experience with a new pop up with relevant cues.

1. Contact: You can now download invalid contacts that were not uploaded properly, clean them up and re-upload them into Wati.

1. Contact: When importing a contact file, you can map the "Name" and "Phone" fields so that you have your data set up right in Wati!

1. Flow builder: We have introduced a new ‘Flow Timer’ that allows you quite the flow and move on to other operations if the customers are not responding

1. Payment: Updated the "Buy Credit" popup for easier use.

1. Payment: Updated some in-product reminders regarding missed payments with some helpful tips, so its easier for you to make your payments

12. You can now request for more than 20 teams on our Enterprise plan. Reach out to our team to know more details!

Bug fixes:

• When selecting template in team inbox, there used to be duplicate headers for some templates, and the text box used to disappear for custom variables. This is fixed now.
• If the conversation was blocked, admins still received notifications from blocked chats. This won’t happen anymore.
• A chat automatically scrolled down to its latest message when there were incoming messages from other chats, this won’t happen anymore.
• Woocomerce Abandoned Cart was sending out messages to customers even if they had already completed purchases at some point. No, the abandoned cart message will first check for the purchase, and only send out a message if transaction was not completed.
• Country code was missing in some webhook events, that has been fixed now
• For customers on Cloud API - the "About" field changes in Business Profile were not being saved. That has been fixed now.
• Advanced option with Date/ DateTime/ Time validation in question node flow is now fixed.

This one has a few small enhancements across the product.

New Features and Enhancements:

• We updated some labels in our Chinese and Portuguese translations.
• We made some performance improvements to make your messaging experience smoother. (Show us some love if you can feel the difference 😁
• We improved our embedded signup retry process, so that you won’t face too many errors from whatsApp side while creating a new account.
• We finally have a way to tracking message events like read, delivered etc and map it back to the request you created. For example, when you receive a webhook from Wati about a message that is read, you can now know which message is being referred to. To be able to do this, we have created two new API endpoints that gives you this additional information. Try it out, and let us know if this is useful!

This release has mostly been about improving our Shopify integration for all commerce customers 😍 Other integration users please stay tuned for upcoming update. We won't forget you! 💖

New Features and Enhancements:

1. Shopify: Merchants can now use the parameter "product_image_url" which will show product image preview for their end customers

   

   
   

   

2. Shopify: Merchants can send up to 3 different abandoned cart messages with different content, at different times

   

Bug Fixes:

• Team Inbox: Fixed some complicated bugs that resulted in operator not being assigned a ticket in rare cases!