Connect your WhatsApp Business number, and your agent answers customers who message it. Anything it shouldn’t answer lands in your Inbox for your team.
Note
What you need
- A WhatsApp Business account at Meta, or the sign-in to make one during setup.
- A payment method on that account. Meta bills you directly for each reply your agent sends, apart from your hiy plan.
- A published Support Agent that anyone can reach.
Set it up
Open Channels, find Messaging and press Set up. Only an owner or admin can.
- Pick the agent that answers your WhatsApp.
- Choose the number. For now that is a number that isn’t on WhatsApp yet. Keeping your WhatsApp Business app comes next.
- Connect with Meta. Meta’s window opens: sign in, pick or create your WhatsApp Business account and number, and approve hiy. Then add a payment method in WhatsApp Manager.
- Send a test from your phone. The setup shows it arriving.
- Choose what the agent does: answer and hand over when unsure, answer only out of your team’s hours, or stay off.
What your customers see
Your agent’s first reply says it is an AI assistant for your business; if your agent hands over to your team, it also says writing person reaches them. Later replies carry no label. Each answer is one message, with up to two links to your sources. When the agent can’t answer, a Talk to a person button comes with the reply.
WhatsApp lets a business reply freely for 24 hours after the customer’s last message. Your agent only replies inside that window.
Try this door under Manage shows the reply your agent would send to a question you type. Nothing is sent, and it is free.
What goes to your Inbox
The agent stays silent and the message waits in your Inbox when:
- the customer writes person or presses Talk to a person, when your agent hands over (they’re told your team has it);
- the agent is off, or set to answer only out of hours and your team is in;
- your team already has the conversation;
- one customer reached 20 replies in an hour.
Until replying from hiy arrives, your team can’t answer a WhatsApp chat from hiy: call the customer if you need to, then press Mark done, and the agent answers that customer’s next message again.
Limits
- The agent reads text only. A photo, voice note or file gets a short reply saying so, unless your team has the conversation: then your team sees that it came.
- A customer who writes stop gets no message from you first again.
- Lookups and actions don’t run on WhatsApp.
- Message templates: hiy asks Meta to approve two short messages for later use (a handover receipt and a “the team replied” note). Manage shows Meta’s answer; none is sent yet.
- Disconnect under Manage stops answering the number. The history is kept.