One WhatsApp number, your whole team answering

The consumer WhatsApp Business app allows one phone plus four linked devices, all logged in as the same identity. There is no assignment, no way to know who is handling what, no private notes, and no record of who said what to whom. When someone leaves, the conversations leave with the phone.

What a shared inbox adds

• Individual agent logins — 1 seat on Starter, 4 on Growth, 10 on Pro, 20 on Diamond, with extra seats at $20/month on Growth and above.
• Assignment and ownership, so every chat has exactly one person responsible, and round-robin distribution so it is shared fairly instead of by whoever is fastest.
• Teams — sales, support, deliveries — each with their own colour and queue.
• Private notes with @mentions that the customer never sees.
• Tags, saved attributes and conversation status from open to resolved.
• Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger in the same queue, so an agent works one list rather than three apps.
• Roles and per-page permissions, so an agent sees the inbox without seeing billing.

The 24-hour window, and the mistake it causes

WhatsApp lets you reply freely for 24 hours after a customer's last message; after that only an approved template can re-open the conversation — see Meta's messaging guide. The failure this causes in a busy team is specific: an agent opens a chat that expired hours ago, types a reply, and it silently fails.

ConvoFly's inbox tracks each conversation's window on a clock rather than on page loads, and locks the composer when the window has closed, offering a template instead. It sounds like a small thing. It is the difference between "we replied" and "we thought we replied".

Deciding who owns a conversation

Ownership is the thing that stops a shared inbox becoming a group chat nobody is responsible for. Three models work, and the wrong one for your team size is the usual cause of chaos:

• Round-robin distributes new chats evenly across available agents. Right for teams of three or more handling interchangeable enquiries.
• Team-based routes by what the message is about — sales, deliveries, complaints — using a keyword or AI condition in the flow, then round-robins inside that team.
• Manual claim, where agents take chats from a shared pool. Fine for two people, unworkable at five, because the easy chats get claimed and the hard ones age.

Whichever you pick, the rule that matters is that every chat has exactly one owner at a time and a status that moves from open to resolved. Running one WhatsApp number across a team covers how assignment, ownership and status interact in practice.

Automation and humans share the same queue, which raises a question worth deciding early: when a bot has been handling a chat and a person needs to take over, who owns it and what do they see? Handing a chat from bot to human sets out the handoff so the customer never repeats themselves.

Shift-aware routing

Assignment is only fair if it respects who is actually working. ConvoFly tracks agent availability and shifts, so round-robin does not hand a chat to someone who logged off two hours ago. Combined with business-hours conditions in the flow builder, out-of-hours messages get an honest holding reply and queue for the next shift instead of sitting unanswered.

Setting the team up

1. Connect your WhatsApp number through Meta's embedded signup during onboarding.
2. Invite your agents. Each gets their own login; your admin account counts as one seat.
3. Create teams that match how you actually work, not your org chart.
4. Set roles so people only see the sections they need.
5. Turn on round-robin and set agent availability or shifts.
6. Agree a tag vocabulary and a definition of "resolved" before you go live. Every inbox that gets messy got messy here.

The window is a team problem, not a technical one

The 24-hour rule looks like a platform detail until you run a team against it. Then it becomes a scheduling constraint: a message that arrives at 6pm on Friday and is picked up on Monday cannot be answered at all, only re-opened with an approved template that may not fit what the customer asked.

Two habits fix most of it. Acknowledge every inbound message automatically, even out of hours, so the clock starts against a conversation somebody has seen. And treat "hours remaining in the window" as a queue-ordering signal rather than first-in-first-out — the 24-hour customer service window explained covers exactly when the clock starts and what re-opens it.

How many seats do you actually need?

Fewer than most teams assume. A seat is needed by anyone who answers customers, not by anyone who wants to look. Common shapes:

• Solo founder: one seat. Starter at $12/month.
• Founder plus two part-time helpers: Growth's four seats, with room to grow.
• A dedicated support shift: count the people on the busiest shift, not everyone on the rota — seats are concurrent logins, and Pro's ten covers most teams of that size.

Extra seats are $20/month on Growth and above, so getting this slightly wrong is cheap to correct.

Moving off the WhatsApp Business app

1. Decide about the number. Migrating your existing number means it stops working in the app on the phone. Many teams connect a second number first and redirect gradually.
2. Export what you need. Chat history does not transfer to the API. Save anything you genuinely need before you migrate.
3. Get your templates approved early. Submit the two or three you know you will need before go-live rather than on the day.
4. Run both for a week. Point new traffic at the new setup while the old phone handles existing threads until they close naturally.
5. Update your links. Website button, Instagram bio, QR codes on packaging — a click-to-chat link pointing at a dead number is the most common post-migration mistake.

Agreeing what "resolved" means

Every inbox metric depends on this and almost nobody defines it. If one agent marks a chat resolved when they have replied and another waits for the customer to confirm, your resolution time is measuring two different things averaged together, and it will look like it is improving whenever the first agent works more shifts.

Pick one definition, write it down, and make it the same for bot-handled and human-handled chats. Measuring whether your automation works covers which numbers actually move when a shared inbox is working, and CSAT scores from a WhatsApp flow covers asking the customer rather than guessing.

Measuring whether it works

From the Pro plan the analytics dashboard reports first-response and resolution times, SLA attainment, first-contact resolution, busiest-times heatmaps and per-agent productivity, with saved reports and scheduled email digests. Auto-CSAT surveys ask customers to rate resolved chats from the Growth plan. Diamond adds an AI customer-experience score on every resolved conversation.

Templates are the other team-wide concern. Every message that re-opens a closed conversation needs one, and they are approved per account rather than per agent, so the set your team can reach for is a shared resource worth curating — see Meta's template documentation and how many templates you can have.

One caveat worth knowing: read receipts under-count, because WhatsApp only reports a read once and customers can disable receipts entirely. Treat delivery as the reliable number and reads as a floor.

WhatsApp Business app vs a shared inbox

Figures checked August 2026. WhatsApp platform limits and charges are set by Meta and can change — always confirm against Meta's own documentation.

Common questions