Handling Meta’s 24h customer service window when sending WhatsApp reminders

I’ve built an n8n flow that listens to a WordPress contact form webhook.
Whenever someone submits the form, the flow generates a summary (with formatting, emojis, contact details, etc.) and forwards it to a customer’s WhatsApp number.

Here’s the issue: the recipient almost never replies. These WhatsApp messages are meant as reminders (e.g. “a new quote request is waiting for you”), not interactive chats. And since there isn’t always a new request every 24 hours, I frequently run into Meta’s 24-hour customer service window limitation.

  • Free-form messages work fine inside 24h.

  • After 24h, they silently fail.

  • My current workaround: every morning at 08:00 I send a short template message (like “You’ll receive your daily update later today”) to keep the session alive, so I can continue to push the longer free-form summaries.

It works, but it feels hacky.

Questions:

  • Is this the only way to keep the 24h window open?

  • Are there better practices for “notification style” WhatsApp use cases in n8n?

  • Should I instead structure everything as approved templates (and pass the entire summary into placeholders)?

Curious how others are handling this.

If you only want to send messages, you’ll quickly run into Meta’s 24-hour customer service window. There’s really no way around this. So, I created a template in the WhatsApp manager containing the variables I want to fill with n8n. You can always send messages from Meta’s templates.

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