WhatsApp automation that protects your number

WhatsApp is the highest-intent channel most Indian businesses have and the easiest one to destroy. Send the wrong message to the wrong number and Meta drops your quality rating; do it twice and your number stops delivering. SMAAI's WhatsApp lane is designed around that risk first and throughput second.

Built on the official Cloud API

Campaigns run through Meta's WhatsApp Cloud API v21.0 using your own business number and your own approved message templates. No unofficial libraries, no browser automation, no shared sending pool where somebody else's behaviour damages your number.

Sends are paced at 50 milliseconds apart, well inside Meta's standard-tier allowance, and progress is committed every ten messages — so a campaign interrupted halfway does not lose its record of who already received it and re-send to them.

Each account's credentials stay isolated to that account for the duration of a send and are restored afterwards, so one workspace's tokens are never in scope while another's campaign runs.

Two-way, not just broadcast

Replies come back in. An inbound message opens WhatsApp's 24-hour conversation window, and inside that window SMAAI can respond in free text rather than templates. The reply brain sorts each message into one of four routes:

• Routine — answered automatically: the answer first, then at most one soft next step. Two to four short sentences, because nobody reads a paragraph on WhatsApp.
• Hot — a holding reply, an alert to your team and a CRM update. A human closes it. The AI does not try to negotiate.
• Angry — no automatic reply at all. Your team is alerted and takes it over.
• Negative — one polite opt-out acknowledgement, then that contact is suppressed permanently.

Voice notes are transcribed, so a customer replying by holding down the mic button still gets a sensible response.

The safety rules are the product

These are enforced in code, not left to whoever writes the campaign:

• A cold first message is always a pre-approved template. There is no open conversation window yet, so free text is not permitted — and SMAAI will not attempt it.
• Opt-out is checked before every single send, at the sending layer rather than only inside the reply logic, so a STOP is honoured forever and cannot be undone by a later import.
• Landlines are excluded. A number that may not be on WhatsApp produces an undeliverable error, and undeliverable errors damage a young number's standing.
• No multi-step chaser sequences. Every marketing template costs money and risks your rating. At most one optional re-engagement message exists, it is off by default, and it can only go to someone who already replied to you.
• Undeliverable errors are never retried. Meta's undeliverable codes are known and treated as final rather than paid for twice.
• Contacts already in play are never touched by automation — anyone replying, engaging, qualified, opted out or lost is left to your team.

If the access token dies or Meta drops your quality rating to red, the lane stops itself, marks itself paused and alerts a human. It will not resume on its own. That is deliberate: the failure mode of an automated WhatsApp sender should be silence, not persistence.

Pacing

Outbound is capped at 40 templates per day, with a randomised gap of 8 to 40 seconds between sends and a sending window of business hours in IST. A re-engagement message requires at least four days of silence first. These are conservative on purpose — the constraint on cold WhatsApp is never how fast you can send, it is how long your number survives.

Click-to-WhatsApp advertising

The same channel works as a paid acquisition path. SMAAI can create Meta ad campaigns whose call to action opens a WhatsApp conversation with your business, so the ad delivers a live conversation rather than a form fill — with the resulting contact landing directly in your CRM.

Availability. Two-way WhatsApp is available from Starter; sending requires your own WhatsApp Business API credentials, which SMAAI will walk you through connecting.