FirstReply connects to the WhatsApp Business Platform (the Cloud API), not to WhatsApp on a phone. Messages to your business number arrive in the inbox and replies go back through the same number.
What you need
- A WhatsApp Business account in Meta Business Manager.
- A phone number registered to it. The number cannot also be in use in the consumer WhatsApp app.
- Admin rights on the Business Manager account, so you can approve access.
If you do not have this yet, set it up in Meta Business Manager first. There is nothing FirstReply can do to shortcut Meta's verification.
Connecting
Add an inbox of type WhatsApp and start the connection. You are sent to Meta, you sign in and approve the permissions, and you return with the business account, phone number and display name filled in automatically. There are no credentials to type.
The access token is stored encrypted and refreshed before it expires. If someone revokes FirstReply's access in Business Manager, the refresh fails and the inbox is marked unhealthy; reconnecting means running the flow again.
The 24-hour window
This is Meta's rule, not FirstReply's, and it is the thing that surprises teams most:
You may send free-form messages to a customer only within 24 hours of their last message. After that, only pre-approved message templates may be sent.
In practice, replying to a customer who wrote this morning is fine. Following up two days later on a conversation that went quiet is not, unless you use an approved template. Templates are created and approved in Business Manager.
Limits
Replies are capped at 4,096 characters. The editor shows the remaining count and stops you exceeding it.
Replies are plain text. Formatting from the editor is stripped. WhatsApp's
own *bold* and _italic_ markers pass through as the literal characters you
type.
Attachments are not supported on this channel.
Contacts
WhatsApp identifies people by phone number, not email. A contact created from a WhatsApp conversation therefore has a phone number and the display name the customer set on their own account, which may be a first name only or a nickname.
If the same person also writes by email, they arrive as two contacts. Merging them keeps the history together.
Working with it day to day
WhatsApp conversations have no subject and read as a chat. Everything else in the inbox behaves the same: they are classified, the assistant can answer them, they are assigned, they close.
Because messages are short and expectations are fast, WhatsApp is a good channel to point at a well-covered part of your knowledge base (order status, opening hours, delivery windows) and a poor one for anything that needs a long explanation.