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SMS and email

Some of the most important messages are sent a day or two after a chat ends: "your parcel has shipped", "your return was approved". WhatsApp has a rule that limits what you can send by then. SMS and email make sure those messages still arrive.

Both are optional. Without them, the agent still works; some late updates simply have nowhere to go.

The 24-hour window

After a customer messages you, you can reply to them freely on WhatsApp for 24 hours. The clock restarts every time they write again. Your own replies do not restart it.

Outside those 24 hours, WhatsApp only lets you send messages it has approved in advance, such as an order confirmation, a payment link or an order status update.

How a message finds its way

When the agent or your shop needs to reach a customer, it tries these in order and stops at the first one that works:

  1. A normal WhatsApp reply, if the 24-hour window is open.
  2. An approved WhatsApp message, if the window has closed.
  3. SMS, if you have connected one.
  4. Email, if you have connected one and we have the customer's address. Email is the only one that can carry an attachment.

A customer never gets the same update twice on two channels. The next channel is tried only if the one before it could not be used.

If a customer has opted out of messages, none of these are tried.

SMS with MSG91

What you need

  1. An MSG91 account with your DLT registration complete. This is an Indian legal requirement for every business SMS, not an MSG91 rule.
  2. Your auth key from the MSG91 dashboard.
  3. Your sender ID: the six letters your messages come from, for example ANJALI.

Steps

  1. In Resandhi, open Connections, find MSG91 SMS under When WhatsApp cannot be used, and click Connect.
  2. Paste your auth key and sender ID.
  3. Optional but recommended: make up a long random string and paste it as the delivery report token. Then, in MSG91, set your delivery report URL to the one shown on the Connections page, adding ?token= and that same string at the end. This lets you see which messages actually arrived.

The part that surprises people

In India you cannot send free text by SMS. Every message must match a template you have registered on DLT.

  • Our standard updates (order confirmed, payment received, shipped, return decided) use templates you register once.
  • If you want the agent to be able to send a one-off sentence by SMS, register a template with a single variable, ##VAR1##, and put its MSG91 flow ID in the settings. Without it, a free-text SMS is refused rather than silently dropped.

Email with Amazon SES

What you need

  1. An AWS account with SES set up. Most Indian shops use the Mumbai region, ap-south-1.
  2. A verified sender in SES: either one address such as [email protected], or your whole domain.
  3. An IAM user with only the ses:SendEmail and ses:GetAccount permissions, and an access key for it.

Steps

  1. In Resandhi, open Connections, find Amazon SES, and click Connect.
  2. Paste the access key ID, the secret access key, and the address you send from.
  3. Optional: add the name customers see, such as your shop's name.

If your SES account is still in the sandbox, you can only email addresses you have verified yourself. Ask AWS for production access in the SES console; it usually takes about a day.

Bounces and complaints

This is optional but worth doing. In SES, create a configuration set, send its bounce and complaint events to an SNS topic, and subscribe that topic to the webhook URL shown on the Connections page. Put the configuration set's name in the Resandhi settings.

AWS watches how often your emails bounce or get marked as spam, and can pause your sending if the numbers get too high. These reports are how we learn which addresses to stop mailing.

Every email is sent with a plain-text version as well as the formatted one, because some email apps show nothing for a formatted-only message.

Coming soon

Twilio SMS, Gmail, Outlook and Zoho Mail are on the way.