Tool
The 24 hour window
The week as a dial. The arc is WhatsApp's 24 hour window from the moment the inquiry came in, the grey band is the weekend, and the hollow dot is your follow-up. Move it and see when it actually goes out.
The window is closed. At 48 hours an ordinary message no longer goes out: an approved template does, written before this conversation existed. The customer gets a text sunday 16:00 that looks nothing like what they were talking about, and that is where the conversation breaks.
The model, in the open
The 24 hour rule is the platform's and is documented by Meta: outside that window the only way back in is an approved template. The hours this tool treats as reasonable are ours: 09:00 to 20:00 on weekdays, saturdays 10:00 to 14:00, sundays never. It is an illustrative model built from what we see in our implementations, not the measurement of any customer.
How to read it
- The arc does not move with the follow-up: it moves with the inquiry. What closes the window is the customer's silence, not your team's clock.
- A follow-up at 48 hours falls outside the window every time, whatever day the inquiry came in. What changes with the day is whether it also lands at an hour when somebody can handle the reply.
- Put the inquiry on a friday afternoon and bring the follow-up down to 24 hours: the window sits right at its limit and the message lands on saturday afternoon. That combination configures itself, and nobody tests it.
This object is the interactive half of an article: Why an AI agent available 24/7 needs to know what day it is