When does your assistant follow up?

Your assistant answers every enquiry the moment it arrives. Following up on the quiet ones — the customer who asked for a quote and then vanished — is a different job, and it works differently: it does not happen at all until you switch it on.

A brand-new account sends zero follow-ups. Not a conservative few — none. Until you put a cadence on a pipeline column, a customer who goes quiet is simply left alone, forever.

That default is deliberate, and this page exists because it surprises people. An assistant that follows up sends real WhatsApp messages and places real phone calls to your customers, under your name and your number. A feature like that must not switch itself on the day you sign up, before you have seen a single deal or chosen a single word. So it waits for you — and everything it does afterwards is bounded by the stops described further down.

Turning it on is a per-column setting on the pipeline board: Setting up your sales pipeline walks through the whole screen. This page is about what happens once you have.

How a quiet enquiry reaches the board at all

Before anything can be chased, it has to become a deal.

Phone calls are read at the moment they end. Chat is different — a WhatsApp or website conversation has no hang-up moment, so your assistant treats a thread as finished once it has been quiet for about 30 minutes. Only then does it write the summary, and only then can your intake rules turn the conversation into a card on the board.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• Chat deals are not instant. A customer who enquires at 2pm becomes a card around 2:30 at the earliest, not at 2:01.
• A customer who replies after a long pause produces a second reading of the conversation, not a correction of the first.

The clock runs from the deal’s last activity — not the customer’s last message

“Message after 3 days” does not mean three days since the customer last wrote. It means three days since anything happened on the deal: a call, a message in either direction, a stage move, a note.

So a deal you dragged to another column this morning is not quiet, even if the customer has been silent for a week — your move reset the clock. Scheduling a follow-up is not itself activity, which is what lets a 2-day message and a 5-day call both fire on a deal that stays genuinely silent. What “quiet” means has the detail.

Where a follow-up can actually go

Each channel has its own rules about being contacted first, and they are Meta’s rules, not settings:

Channel	Inside 24h	After 24h
WhatsApp	free-form message	approved template only
Instagram	free-form message	nothing — no template exists
Messenger	free-form message	nothing — no template exists
Webchat	—	no follow-up; we cannot reach a closed browser tab

The window is 24 hours from the customer’s last message. Inside it, a business may write freely. Outside it, WhatsApp allows only a template Meta has approved in advance — and Instagram and Messenger allow nothing at all. That last cell is not a missing feature: those channels have no template concept, and no compliant way exists for an assistant to restart a conversation on them after 24 hours.

What that means in practice today:

• Follow-up messages go out on WhatsApp only. A deal that arrived from Instagram, Messenger or webchat can still be flagged to a person, and can still be called — but no chat message will chase it.
• Cadences are measured in whole days, so almost every follow-up message lands outside the 24-hour window — which means almost every one is sent as the approved template, kooday_chase, with fixed wording and a Reply STOP line. Why your follow-ups need their own template explains the template, why it is worded the way it is, and what happens when it is missing.
• Webchat is permanent. There will never be a webchat follow-up; there is no way to reach a browser tab that has been closed. The honest move for a webchat lead you care about is to collect a phone number while the conversation is live.

A cadence worth starting with

There is a right shape, so start with it rather than deriving your own:

Rule	Days	Why
Message after	2–3	The first chase does most of the work; later ones add less each time
Call after	5–7	A voice on the phone reaches the people who ignore messages
Flag to a person after	10	If two attempts changed nothing, a human should decide, not a third message

Three ideas behind the numbers:

• Front-load it. The value of a follow-up decays fast; two touches in the first week beat six spread over a month.
• Few touches, then stop. Your assistant enforces this whatever you configure — see the attempt cap below.
• End it deliberately. The flag-to-a-person rule is the deliberate ending: it puts the deal in front of you with a note, instead of letting the sequence trail off.

Put a cadence on the one or two columns where deals genuinely go quiet, not on every column. And keep the last column before Won set to You work it — a person is negotiating there, and automated chasing would cut across them.

What stops a chase

This is the half of the design that runs without you. Every one of these stops is automatic, and every one fails closed — if your assistant cannot confirm a message is allowed, it does not send it.

Stop	Scope	Undone by
Deal marked Won or Lost	that deal	— (it is closed)
A person took the deal over	that deal	handing it back to the assistant
Deal snoozed	that deal, until the snooze ends	the snooze expiring
Column set to You work it	every deal in that column	changing the column setting
Pipeline switched off	everything	switching it back on
The customer said no — “we went with someone else”, “not right now”	that deal	the customer writing back
The attempt cap: three follow-ups, then stop	that deal	nothing — a new enquiry starts a new deal at zero
The customer opted out — stop, unsubscribe	every deal, every channel, and calls	only the customer, by replying START

There is also one pacing rule rather than a stop: the same kind of follow-up never repeats within 24 hours on the same deal, whatever your day counts say.

The last three stops in the table are worth a sentence each, because they are the ones people ask about:

Your assistant reads the answer. A reply that is clearly a no — “no thanks”, “we went with someone else”, venda, nahi — stops the chasing on that deal and leaves a note asking you to decide what the deal becomes. The deal stays open: only a person ever marks a deal Won or Lost. If the customer later writes back, their new message supersedes their old answer and the assistant may resume — still within whatever attempts remain.

Three attempts, total. Messages and calls together, counted on the deal, and nothing resets the count — not a stage move, not a rename, not time passing. After the third attempt with no reply, your assistant stops and flags the deal to a person instead of sending a fourth. The cap is not configurable; a cap you could raise would not be one.

An opt-out is a different thing entirely. It stops promotional contact with that person — every deal, every channel, and sales calls too — and nobody at your business or at Kooday can reverse it; only the customer can, by replying START. When a customer asks you to stop covers all of it, including the difference between a plain STOP and STOP ALL.

One stop is a fault rather than a design: if the kooday_chase template is missing or unapproved, out-of-window follow-ups are declined with the reason no_chase_template and nothing is sent. See the template page if follow-ups have stopped for everyone at once.

Frequently asked questions

Why didn’t my assistant follow up?

Work down this list — every item is a designed stop, not a fault:

1. No cadence is set. This is the answer for every fresh account: zero follow-ups is the default, per column, until you configure one.
2. The deal was not actually quiet — any activity, including your own stage move or note, resets the clock.
3. The column is set to You work it, the deal was taken over by a person, or it is snoozed.
4. The customer already said no, opted out, or has had three attempts.
5. The deal came from Instagram, Messenger or webchat — follow-up messages are WhatsApp-only today.
6. kooday_chase is missing or unapproved — this one stops follow-ups for everyone, not one deal.

Why did the follow-up look different from what the AI said it would send?

Because of the 24-hour window. The wording your assistant drafts — and the brief you wrote on the column — can only be used inside 24 hours of the customer’s last message. Outside it, WhatsApp permits only the pre-approved template, whose wording is fixed: “{your business name} here — just following up on your enquiry…”. Since day-based cadences almost always fire outside the window, the template is what customers usually receive, whatever was drafted.

Can it follow up on Instagram?

No. Inside 24 hours of the customer’s last message Instagram allows free-form replies, but today’s follow-ups are measured in days and sent on WhatsApp only. And after 24 hours the answer is permanent: Instagram and Messenger have no approved-template mechanism, so no compliant follow-up exists there at all. An Instagram deal can still be flagged to a person, or called if you have a number.

Does a follow-up cost me anything?

It can. A follow-up sent outside the 24-hour window goes as an approved marketing template, and Meta bills template-opened conversations to your WhatsApp Business account — the rate depends on your country. Replies inside the window are free-form and free. A cadence set aggressively on a busy pipeline has a real Meta cost, which is one more reason the attempt cap exists. Calls cost whatever your calling minutes cost.

A customer asked us to stop — what do I do?

If they typed it to your assistant — stop, unsubscribe, take me off your list — nothing: it is already done, they got an immediate confirmation, and they are on your Opted out screen. If they told a person — on a call, in the shop — it can be recorded manually so the platform honours it the same way; see When a customer asks you to stop. Do not sit on it: every message sent after someone asked you to stop is a block or a report waiting to happen, and those are scored against your number.

Can I message someone who opted out?

Replying is fine — if they write to you, of course you answer, and your assistant does too. What is off-limits is initiating: promotional follow-ups, offers, re-engagement, and sales calls all stop, and Kooday will not send them. A plain STOP stops promotions only, so order, booking and payment updates keep flowing; STOP ALL stops everything. The one thing software cannot block is a person on your team typing an offer into a live reply — the No promotions chip on the conversation is there so nobody does that by accident.

How do I resume messaging someone who opted out?

You can’t — only they can. There is no button, for anyone, including Kooday support. If a customer says they want your messages again, ask them to reply START to your WhatsApp number. That is deliberate: the opt-out list is only worth anything if no campaign, salesperson or support ticket can talk it open. The customer replying START is the one record that proves they asked.

What’s the difference between a closed deal and an opt-out?

Scope, and who can undo it. A closed deal — or a deal where the customer said “no thanks” — is about one deal: the person is still your customer, still contactable, and you can open a new deal with them next quarter. An opt-out is about the person: every deal, every channel, calls included, and only they can lift it. Confusing the two in one direction loses you a customer you could have kept; in the other, it keeps messaging someone who told you to stop, which is how numbers get blocked, reported and eventually banned. The opt-out page has a side-by-side table.