How to route conversations on the WhatsApp Business API
Every incoming WhatsApp message needs to reach the right person fast — a sales query should not sit in a support queue, and a billing question should not wait behind pre-sales chatter. On the official WhatsApp Business API with InfiQ, conversation routing lets you send each chat to the correct team, agent, or bot automatically, based on keywords, the entry point, business hours, or the customer's history. This tutorial walks you through building a routing setup from scratch inside InfiQ's shared team inbox — with the exact order to do things in, the settings that matter, and the mistakes that quietly break routing in production.
What you'll do
Create your teams and agents, define routing rules (keyword, entry point, or business hours), set a fallback for everything that does not match, test with your own number inside the free 24-hour service window, then go live and watch handoff and response times in the inbox analytics.Before you begin: what you need in place
Routing sits on top of a working WhatsApp Business API account, so get the foundations sorted first. You need an active number connected to InfiQ, your Meta Business Manager verification complete, and a clear picture of how your business is actually organised into teams. Routing is only as good as the structure behind it — spend ten minutes sketching who should own which kinds of conversation before you touch any settings. If you are still connecting your number, work through the get-started tutorial first, then come back here.
- An active, verified WhatsApp Business API number on InfiQ
- The list of teams you want (for example Sales, Support, Billing)
- The agents who belong to each team and their working hours
- The entry points customers use — ads, QR codes, website widget, direct number
Step 1 — Create your teams and a default owner
In the InfiQ inbox, open Team settings and create one team per real function rather than one per person — teams route more reliably than individuals because they survive an agent being on leave. Add agents to each team and, critically, nominate a default owner or catch-all team that receives anything a rule does not explicitly match. This fallback is the single most important setting in the whole flow: without it, an unmatched conversation can land nowhere and go unanswered while the customer waits.
- Create teams by function, not by individual agent
- Assign agents and set each agent's availability
- Nominate one default owner or catch-all team as the fallback
- Keep the fallback team staffed — it will catch edge cases you did not predict
Step 2 — Define your routing rules
With teams in place, build the rules that decide where each conversation goes. InfiQ evaluates rules in order, top to bottom, and the first match wins — so put your most specific rules above your broad ones. Start with the routing signal that matches how customers actually reach you. Most businesses combine two or three signals: a keyword rule to catch intent, an entry-point rule to separate campaign traffic from organic, and a business-hours rule so after-hours chats behave differently from daytime ones.
- Keyword routing — send chats containing words like 'invoice', 'refund', or 'demo' to the matching team
- Entry-point routing — route Click-to-WhatsApp ads, QR codes, and the website widget to different teams by tagging each source
- Business-hours routing — during hours go to a live team, off-hours go to a bot, an auto-reply, or a queue
- Order matters — place specific rules above general ones so the right one fires first
Step 3 — Add a bot or greeting to capture intent (optional)
If your keywords alone are not precise enough, put a lightweight bot in front of the router. A simple menu — 'Reply 1 for Sales, 2 for Support, 3 for Billing' — captures intent cleanly and then hands the conversation to the matching team. Decide the handoff point deliberately: the bot should own the chat until intent is clear, then transfer ownership so a human is unambiguously responsible. All of this happens inside the free 24-hour service window when the customer messaged first, so these back-and-forth replies are not template-billed.
- Use a menu or free-text capture to identify intent before assigning a human
- Set a clear handoff trigger so ownership never falls between the bot and the team
- Offer an 'talk to a person' escape so customers are never stuck with the bot
- Remember replies inside the 24-hour window are free service messages, not billed templates
Step 4 — Test every path with your own number
Never launch routing untested. Message your own WhatsApp number through each entry point and trigger each rule — send the keywords, scan the QR code, click the ad, and message inside and outside business hours. Confirm each conversation lands in the intended team and that anything deliberately non-matching falls through to your fallback. This is where you catch the silent failures: a keyword that never fires because a broader rule sits above it, or an entry-point tag that was never applied to the ad.
- Trigger each keyword and confirm it lands in the right team
- Test every entry point — ad, QR, widget, direct — separately
- Message inside and outside business hours to verify time-based rules
- Deliberately send something that matches nothing and confirm it reaches the fallback
Step 5 — Go live and monitor the numbers
Once every path checks out, enable routing for real traffic and keep an eye on the inbox analytics for the first few days. The metrics that reveal a healthy routing tree are first-response time per team, the share of conversations hitting the fallback bucket, and any chats that bounce between teams. A rising fallback share almost always means a missing keyword or a broken entry-point tag — tighten the rule and re-test rather than letting it drift. Review weekly at first, then monthly once it stabilises.
- Watch first-response time per team to spot an overloaded queue
- Keep the fallback share low — a spike signals a rule gap
- Investigate conversations that bounce between teams; usually a rule-order issue
- Revisit rules as you add new campaigns, teams, or entry points