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Customer service window
The 24-hour window that opens when a customer messages your business. Replies you send inside it are free-form and are not charged as template messages.
One term from the WhatsApp Business Platform glossary. Last updated 2026-07-25.
Every inbound customer message opens a 24-hour window. Inside it, a business can reply with anything — plain text, images, documents, buttons — with no template submitted in advance and no per-message template charge.
This is the mechanic that makes support economics on WhatsApp work, and the reason response time is a cost lever rather than only a service metric. A team that answers within the window pays nothing per reply. A team that lets the window lapse must re-open the conversation with a paid template. Routing rules and away-hours automations exist largely to keep conversations inside it.
Related terms
- Template message
- A pre-approved message format required to contact a customer outside the 24-hour customer service window. Meta categorises templates as Marketing, Utility or Authentication, and charges a different rate for each.
- Message category (Marketing, Utility, Authentication, Service)
- The four buckets Meta sorts WhatsApp conversations into. Marketing, Utility and Authentication are template messages and each carries its own rate; Service messages are free-form replies inside the 24-hour window.
- WhatsApp Coexistence
- A Meta capability that lets an eligible business keep using the WhatsApp Business App while the same phone number is also connected to the API, with message origin tracking and echo de-duplication.
See Customer service window in a real workspace
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