This month we are very excited to bring in a bunch of product updates for you! We have updates and enhancements across the board, be it Team Inbox or Automations, we have something for everyone 🎁

Please note, you might see some of these changes over the next few weeks as we roll them out 👀

Team Inbox updates

Our Business Plan customers can now choose to hide their contact’s phone numbers from the Team Inbox users. Whether you want to refrain your support team users from viewing the phone number details or want to enable your sales team members to see the contact details so they can reach out over call, this feature has the flexibility to support multiple use cases. 

Click here for a detailed guide on how to set it up. If you wish to get access to the feature, please reach out to our support team at support@wati.io.

Wati API updates

Our Wati API portfolio has some very useful new entrants!

• Bot assignment - You can now assign any opened conversation to the Bot and not just to users. Simply use the existing /assignOperator API without passing in any user email
• Ticket status management - Update ticket status via the all new /updateChatStatus API. Available statuses are OPEN, PENDING, SOLVED and BLOCK, same as what you would see in your Team Inbox.
• Contact attribute management - Apply attribute changes to contacts in bulk with the /updateContactAttributesForMultiContacts API

Shopify updates

We now support Third party checkout providers cart URL in Shopify app! Wati customers who have enabled checkout service from the following companies Shopflo, Gokwik, Zecpe can now send abandoned cart message from Wati with the new checkout URL 😎

Click here to learn more.

Template updates

Our Carousel templates now support upto 2 buttons. What’s more, you can also add dynamic URL’s as one of the buttons.

Enhancements

• Auto checkout for Catalog is now available for our Indian Pro and Business plan customers
• Admin user metrics are now visible under the operator performance chart in Team inbox analytics
• CTWA insights now show daily breakdown for ad metrics. Previously, only cumulative metrics were available from the date the ad was published

Bug fixes

• Resolved the issue where for some cases the automation flow builder was showing a connection between nodes but nodes connection logic was not working
• Resolved issue of duplicate messages sent from Google Sheets Plugin
• Resolving an error “User doesn’t exist” that occurs during a specific scenario on Embedded Signup

Have any feedback, suggestions or feature requests for us?

Please post it here 👉 https://feedback.wati.io

We’ve been working on making some changes to bloom us into Spring! 🌸 Here’s an update from Wati HQ! This month we’ve buckled down on our automations and analytics.

Automation enhancements 🤖⚙️

You can now create rule-based automations based on contact attributes

If you have ever wanted to trigger a chatbot, message or even route a chat based from when your contacts attributes is updated or changed, you can do this now!

Learn more about this feature

This is a sample of a Rule to trigger a chatbot based on Attribute changes

Team inbox analytics updates 📊

Operator performance charts (enhanced from top users duration & top users chats charts)

• Provides breakdown of each operator performance based on chat status, such as open, pending, assigned, expired & much more!
• Average first response time, average resolution time
• Operator availability - how long the operator was online for

Read more about this functionality

Team inbox scheduled report

You’ll be able to schedule a weekly performance report straight to your email! It’ll give you a round up on how the team & each operators are performing

Full set up information here

Note: this feature is available for our Pro and Business plans only

Automatic chat enhancements

We’ve aligned our automatic chat assignment to work in parallel with your other default action settings

Broadcast updates

Broadcast analytics

We’ve given the broadcast analytics page a little refresh, including adding the ability to retarget replied customers

• Click send broadcast under your replied data to retarget automatically

🎠 Carousel templates 🎠

Customise up to 5 carousel cards with images to show off your new products

Note: this feature is available for our Pro and Business plans only

Right to left support (e.g Arabic) in templates

When you type or paste in Arabic, the alignment will format correctly from right to left.

This also works with Hebrew or Urdu!

Shopify updates 🛍️

Add images to order confirmation messages

When creating a template message, choose a media then select “add variable”

Shopify custom attributes

Enhanced automatic custom attributes shown in team inbox

View custom attributes like order id, cart recovered, average order value, tracking url and more!

Learn more about these attributes

Note: this feature is available for our Pro and Business plans only

Bug fixes 🛠️

• Fixed out of office default action that is triggered only when it’s working hours and no agents are available
• Trigger payment message automatically when customers provide the address
• Enhanced filtering of contacts that were loading slowly before

Another month comes another round of updates for you 🏋🏻 we’ve made a few small changes, so watch this space for more next month!

Estimated cost when balance is low

To make broadcasting easier, we’ll give you an estimated cost when your balance is low

Upgrade easily when using round robin

Easily manage invalid contacts whilst broadcasting

Don’t waste your $$ on invalid customers, we’ll prompt you now to exclude them from your broadcast & future broadcasts

Improved onboarding experience for migration

We support migration directly from the embedded sign up flow, these will be done automatically:

• Phone number is migrated to new WABA
• Number is verified on new WABA
• Templates are auto-migrated
• Messaging limit is migrated
• Green tick (if any) is migrated

Bug fixes 🐛🦋

• Fixed the issue of not being able to connect to catalog account
• Fixed shortcut that allows search in chats
• Round robin assigns to default team users only (previously was assigned to all online users)
• Emojis are fully shown in team inbox
• Show error message when coupon is selected for utility templates as it's not supported

We’ve been working hard on getting some new product updates for you! We’ve focused on making sending broadcasts even easier, new template types, Shopify checkout changes.

Please note, you might see some of these changes over the next few weeks as we roll them out 👀

Broadcast updates

Approved templates can now be broadcasted in just a click (so no need to go to other pages once you’ve submitted!)

Broadcast easily to newly added contacts:

Template updates - Catalog & coupon codes ✍️

There are a few new features you can create with to your templates - catalog & coupon codes! Choose them under the “marketing” category.

Once you’ve connected your catalog account via the commerce page, you can submit a catalog template to share your catalog page with your customers 🛍️

You can add coupon codes into your template now, making it super easy for your customers to copy the code and shop 🛒

Link shortener

Directly shorten your links in our template editor

Click here to learn more

Shopify updates

We’ve introduced some biiig new changes to Shopify - you can now enable a whole checkout flow:

• Enable or Disable Shopify checkout flow
• Manage orders from the catalog orders page
• Create own checkout flow template
• Add tags to catalog order

Need more help on this? Click here!

More space to send templates in team inbox!

Bug fixes

• Disallow setting password using onboarding URL if the password is already set
• “Trial paid” role is assigned now if Trial user makes a successful purchase
• Issue on multiple abandoned carts getting sent for Shopify customers has been rectified

Have any feedback, suggestions or feature requests for us?

Please post it here 👉 https://feedback.wati.io

Exciting Updates on Wati This Month! 🌟

Here's a glimpse of what we've rolled out:

1. ✉️ Email Notifications when Templates are approved or rejected

   

2. 🔄 Business Verification is no longer mandatory to upgrade your messaging tier. Send high-quality messages to unlock higher tiers!

   

3. 👥 Invite Team Members seamlessly during your first login to Wati

   

4. 📚 Improve the readability of Quick Replies on Team Inbox

   

5. 🔧 Display a System Maintenance Screen during scheduled downtime

   

6. 📢 Added the option to send broadcasts directly from CTWA (Click to WhatsApp Ads) page

   

   
   

🐛 Bug Fixes 🛠️

• 📂 Resolved issue when uploading xlsx file on Contacts
• 🔄 Enable Round-Robin feature on Business Plan users automatically
• 📦 Resolved issue where COD Message was not triggered on Shopify
• 🖼️ Resolved issues where image media was not being downloaded from Team Inbox
• 🔄 Resolved issues with attributes with spaces when using in a Chatbot
• 🎵 Resolved issues where .m4a audio disappears when saving flow
• 🤖 Resolved issue in chatbot where number in condition is too large
• 📝 Resolved issue of incorrect validation of contacts with Attribute when sending Broadcasts
• 🖼️ Resolved issue when pasting image from clipboard in Team Inbox chat

Stay tuned for more enhancements!

Have any feedback or suggestions or feature requests?

Please post it here 👉 https://feedback.wati.io

This month we’ve been working hard on implementing some Team inbox enhancements and template changes!

Feature enhancements

Template library changes

If you fancy some content ✨inspiration✨ or don’t know where to start, you can try our some of our templates

Now neatly hosted in our template library

Updates to the Team Inbox chatlist UI

We have given the chatlist section of Team Inbox a new look, adding new capabilities aimed at making it easier for operators to manage their chats and identify the chats that need to be replied to. These changes include:

• Visibility on which operator the chat is currently assigned to
  You can now see which operator the chat is assigned to, within the chat preview itself.

  Refer this to quickly look at chats which are already being addressed by your team members so you can focus on the ones that aren't assigned.

  An empty space in place of operator name means that it is unassigned (assigned to bot).

  

• Considering only incoming messages from customers as unread messages

  To make it even easier to identify chats which have new customer messages and are unread, we have updated how we represent a chat as unread to ensure that

  • Only incoming messages from customers would be considered while making a chat unread. Messages sent by other operators or the Bot will not make the chat unread. This includes any broadcast or template messages initiated by operators.
  • If a Bot or an operator replies to a customer message that was unread, the chat will automatically become read so you can focus on other chats where new customer messages have come in.
  Additionally, you can view the total count of unread messages upfront without applying the unread chats filter
  

• Improving the way we show the chat date and time 

  To reduce the time it takes to identify when the last message was received on the chat, we have grouped chats at a day level so you can quickly identify which chats had the last message on which day and time, specially when you scroll to view older chats

Bug fixes

Below issues have been resolved in this release

• UI breakage issues on the team inbox dashboard page
• User was unable to see the chat assigned to his team without a page refresh
• New incoming chats were appearing in the filtered list for expired chats
• Scroll bar on the chat was getting hidden for larger screen resolutions

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.