A Quick-Start Guide to Setting Up a WhatsApp Ticketing System

Meet customers where they are

Not only is WhatsApp used by over 2 billion people worldwide, but around 175 million of them message a business on WhatsApp every single day. That’s a huge opportunity to connect with your customers in a space they already trust and use daily. No extra apps to download. No complicated sign-ins. Just quick conversations — in a channel where they’re already spending their time. 

And as most WhatsApp Business Solution Providers, which power your WhatsApp ticketing system, come with multi-agent access, your entire team can access customer tickets from their own device and review all tickets. This ensures full context, transparency, and collaboration.

Centralize tickets with multi-agent access and shared inboxes

Be available 24/7

Whether you’re using simple rule-based chatbots to handle simple workflows like appointment bookings and NPS surveys or an AI bot to answer FAQs and understand context, WhatsApp chatbots help you stay responsive around the clock.

With WhatsApp chatbots, you can scale support — without scaling your team

They keep things moving even when your team’s offline, reduce wait times, and free up agents to handle more complex issues. 

Also Read: How Jobstars India used WhatsApp + Gallabox to automate over 60% of candidate conversations

Increase team productivity

Many Business Solutions Providers (BSPs) come with features like canned responses, genAI support, and automated workflows that take care of repetitive tasks on-screen and behind the scenes. The result? Your agents spend less time juggling chats and more time solving problems — faster, more efficiently, and with fewer handoffs or escalations. 

But that’s not all, you can also measure agent productivity with conversation analytics like first response time, active conversations by agent, and more. This helps identify areas for improvement, optimize workflows, and enhance overall customer satisfaction

Optimize your workflows with in-depth conversation analytics — by customer, agent, and even bot

Real-world impact: How Dubai Housekeeping improved their CSAT scores by 47%

When Dubai Housekeeping found their phone lines couldn’t keep up with growing customer service demand, they made the switch to WhatsApp using Gallabox’s WhatsApp Business API platform. 

By bringing their team into a shared inbox, automating common queries with chatbots, and streamlining responses using generative AI, they saw big results: a 47% jump in CSAT scores and a 25% boost in team productivity. 

Read how Dubai Housekeeping scaled customer support with WhatsApp + Gallabox

Step 1: Creating your WhatsApp Business account with a BSP

Most Business Solution Providers (BSPs) have an “embedded sign-up flow” that allows you to sign up for the WhatsApp Business API directly from their app or website. This typically includes everything from connecting your Facebook Business Manager account and adding your business details to verifying your phone number to integrating the BSP with WhatsApp Business API.

Creating a WhatsApp Business Profile in Gallabox

Once this is done, you’ll need to provide certain legal documents to help Meta verify your business's legitimacy. And remember, this is not the same as getting the coveted “Blue Tick.” For that, you need to reach the Tier 2 Quality Level and send a minimum of 1,000 messages per month. 

Step 2: Setting up your WhatsApp ticketing system

​After creating your WhatsApp Business account with a BSP, the next step is to configure your ticketing system. Here’s how:

Onboard your team

Bring your customer support (and sales) team into WhatsApp. This often involves creating individual agent profiles and assigning specific roles and permissions to each team member to ensure data security. 

Define your ticket-routing rules

Establish clear guidelines on how incoming messages should be categorized and assigned to your team. For example, Gallabox allows you to route tickets by:

• Round-robin routing to distribute tickets equally between all online agents and balance workloads.
• Contact owner routing to allow the same agent to handle all conversations with a customer.
• Bot or team-based routing to assign tickets to a certain team (or bot) based on the nature of the query.

Ticket assignment in Gallabox

Deploy your chatbots

Finally, use your BSP’s chatbot builder to create rule-based or AI chatbots to handle routine queries. Another idea is setting up simple bots to collect basic information before assigning it to an agent — super useful when your team’s out-of-office.

And you’re done with the foundational aspects of your WhatsApp Business ticketing system. As you start processing customer tickets, you’ll get an idea of what labels, filters, and automated workflows you need to further optimize your customer support workflows. 

Also read: Best WhatsApp Chatbot Examples

Challenge 1: Balancing chatbot conversations with real agent support

Automation is great for handling those repetitive questions like "How to set up an account?" or "Where's my order?" But if you overdo it, customers can quickly become frustrated by impersonal, canned responses — their lack of empathy driving customers away.

Challenge 2: Keeping up with WhatsApp's 24-hour limit for first response 

WhatsApp has a 24-hour rule. That means if a customer messages you and you don’t respond within 24 hours, you’ll need to wait for them to message you again or use a paid message template to re-engage

If your team is handling dozens of tickets a day, it’s easy for some to slip through the cracks, especially during peak hours. And that can lead to dropped chats and frustrated customers, not to mention added costs.

Challenge 3: Integrating WhatsApp with your existing support tools

If you're like most support teams, WhatsApp isn't your only channel. You've got emails coming in, chats on your Instagram or Facebook Messenger, and a help desk tracking every interaction. 

And if you don’t integrate WhatsApp with your help desk, then your team’s missing context, or juggling tabs to piece together the full story. Not the best way to provide fast or personalized support.

1. How does a WhatsApp Ticketing System work?

When a customer messages your business on WhatsApp, the ticketing system turns that chat into a ticket. From there, your team can assign it, respond to it, and resolve it — all from one shared inbox. 

2. Do I need WhatsApp Business API to set up a ticketing system?

Yes, if you want “ticketing” features like multi-agent access, shared inboxes, and chatbots, you’ll need the WhatsApp Business API. It’s built for teams and scales as you grow, turning WhatsApp into a complete support channel.

The WhatsApp Business app only allows you to chat with customers, set quick replies, and add labels, and is built for one account. So, while it’s great for smaller teams, it won’t give you the tools you need for really scaling up customer support.

3. Can I integrate WhatsApp Ticketing with my CRM or Helpdesk?

Short answer: yes. Long answer: You can if you’re using WhatsApp Business API and your Business Solutions Provider supports CRM and help desk integrations. Some (like Gallabox) do, while others don’t. So do your research beforehand.