Messages that arrive before you have an assistant

Connecting WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger to Kooday connects the number, not the assistant. From that moment your customers’ messages arrive here, whether or not you have built an assistant yet — they land in your Inbox, you can read them, and you can answer them yourself.

Nothing answers them automatically. That is the only thing an assistant changes.

The same is true of an assistant that exists but is not active: deactivating it stops it answering, it does not disconnect the number. Those messages keep arriving and you can keep replying to them by hand.

What that looks like in the Inbox depends on when the conversation started, and the two are not the same:

• A conversation the assistant was already answering keeps it. It carries the Assistant chip and the reply box is locked until you press Take over — the ordinary step described in Your Inbox, and taking over.
• A conversation that starts while it is switched off has no assistant on it at all, because there was none to attach. It carries No assistant and the reply box is live immediately, exactly like a number that has never had an assistant.

So the same number can show you both, side by side, and that is correct rather than a fault. Every one of them arrived and every one is yours to answer; the only difference is whether there is a Take over step first.

This used to be the other way round. Until recently a number with no assistant attached received nothing at all — the messages reached Kooday and were thrown away. If you connected a number, saw silence, and concluded the connection had failed, it had not. Anything sent to you before this changed is gone and cannot be recovered; everything from here on arrives.

Where they appear

Open Inbox in the sidebar, under Monitor.

A conversation with no assistant behind it looks like any other, with one difference: instead of the Assistant or You chip, it carries No assistant.

⚠️ That chip is about the conversation, not about the number. It says no assistant is attached to this thread, which is why nobody has “taken it over” — there is nothing to take it over from. It does not promise the number has no assistant: as above, a number whose assistant is switched off produces threads of both kinds, and you will see them next to each other.

The list itself works exactly as described in Your Inbox, and taking over: newest customer message first, the same channel tabs, the same opt-out chips, the same 50-row limit.

Answering one

Open the thread and type. There is no Take over step — the reply box is live immediately, because there is no assistant to take the conversation from.

Once you send, the thread is marked as yours and the chip changes from No assistant to You. That matters for later: it is what stops an assistant you connect afterwards from starting to answer a conversation you are in the middle of. A Stop replying yourself button appears alongside it — press that when you are finished, and if an assistant exists by then it picks the thread up on the customer’s next message.

Everything else about replying is unchanged, including the part that catches people out:

The 24-hour window still applies, and it is stricter here. WhatsApp only lets a business send free-typed text within 24 hours of the customer’s last message. Inside that window your reply goes as you typed it. Outside it, nothing can be sent at all — the re-engagement template that normally carries a shortened version of your words belongs to an assistant and is approved by Meta per assistant, so a conversation with no assistant has none to fall back on. Instagram and Messenger have no template in any case.

The practical consequence: answer while they are still there. A message you leave for two days cannot be answered until that customer writes again.

What does not happen yet

	Without an assistant
Messages arrive and are stored	Yes
You can read the whole thread	Yes
You can reply by hand	Yes, inside 24 hours
Someone is alerted that a customer is waiting	Yes — see below
STOP is honoured, and the customer is told	Yes
Anything replies automatically	No
Follow-ups, chases, re-engagement	No
The conversation becomes a deal on your Pipeline	No

The last three are all the same fact stated three ways: each of them is an assistant doing something on your behalf, and there isn’t one. Nothing here is billed either — no assistant runs, so there is nothing to charge for.

Opt-outs are honoured regardless. A customer who replies STOP to a number with no assistant is recorded as opted out and gets the usual confirmation, using your business name. That is not a courtesy — it is the rule, and it does not wait for you to build anything. See When a customer asks you to stop.

Somebody is told. When a customer starts a conversation on a number with no assistant, Kooday raises the same alert it raises when an assistant hands a conversation to a person — once when the conversation starts, not once per message, and again if that customer comes back after a quiet spell. Where it goes is your handover notification setting; see Setting up your pipeline for where that lives. Without this the message would sit in a screen nobody had a reason to open.

The alert says which of the two situations it is: a customer messaged a number with no assistant connected when the number has none, and a customer messaged a number whose assistant is switched off — nobody is answering it when one exists but is deactivated.

It stops there rather than telling you what to press, deliberately: as above, a switched-off assistant produces threads of both shapes, so any single instruction would be wrong for half of them. Open the conversation and it will be obvious which one you have.

Threads you are already answering do not alert you. Once you have replied to a conversation yourself it is marked as yours, and the point of the alert — fetching a person — has already been served. You will hear about the next new conversation, not about the one you are in the middle of.

What changes when you build one

Build an assistant in Bots and switch the channel on for it — the same steps as Creating your assistant and Connecting a channel.

Your existing conversations are picked up automatically. There is nothing to migrate, no list to re-import and no button to press.

⚠️ A thread joins its assistant on the customer’s next message, not the moment you finish setting up. The connection between a conversation and an assistant is made when a message arrives, so a thread that has been quiet since before you built the assistant stays labelled No assistant until that customer writes again — at which point it is answered normally and the chip changes. This is worth knowing before you conclude the setup did not work.

A thread you are holding yourself is left alone. If you had already replied by hand and the conversation is showing You, building an assistant does not take it off you — press Stop replying yourself when you want it to.

Troubleshooting

I connected the number and nothing has arrived

Check you are looking at the right tab. The channel tabs filter the list, and a number connected for WhatsApp puts nothing on the Instagram tab.

Then check the number itself: the connection has to be for the number your customers are actually writing to, and it must be set up for sending as well as receiving — a receive-only connection is not enough for Kooday to identify who the message belongs to.

If the number is right, check the two switches that DO stop messages being kept.

Pausing the connector on the Integrations page stops new conversations appearing. A customer’s STOP is still honoured — that has to work whatever state your connector is in — but nothing else is recorded while it is paused, because “pause the connector” is the answer to “how do I switch this number off”.

Switching the channel off for a bot (Bots → Channels) does the same, for the same reason: it is the switch that says you are not on that surface.

Neither of these is the same as not having an assistant, and neither is the same as having one that is not active — in both of those the number keeps receiving and you can keep answering by hand. If you want a number to stay open while nobody answers automatically, deactivate the assistant; do not switch the channel off. (Website chat is the exception in both directions — see Can I do this on website chat?.)

”This bot has no active WhatsApp connector configured.”

The connector this conversation arrived on is paused or has been removed, so there is nowhere to send from. Re-activate it on the Integrations page. The conversation and everything in it is unaffected — disconnecting a number never deletes the messages that arrived on it.

”This conversation isn’t linked to one of your WhatsApp connections yet”

A conversation is linked to the number it most recently arrived on, and that link started being recorded only recently. Older conversations — including ones you inherit when an assistant is deleted — do not have it yet, and there is no assistant on them whose number could be used instead, so there is nothing to reply from.

It fixes itself the next time that customer messages a connected number whose channel is switched on — that message is what makes the link, and it is also what reopens the 24-hour window, so the two arrive together.

The condition matters, because it is the same one as everywhere else on this page: a message that is not recorded links nothing. If the connector is paused, or the channel is switched off for its assistant, that inbound is not kept and the thread stays unlinked — see the entry above. Nothing is lost in the meantime and the thread stays readable throughout.

The Inbox says “No assistant is answering”

That is the empty-state message for an account with no assistant, and it is accurate: nothing is answering. It does not mean nothing is arriving — on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger the number keeps receiving, which is the whole of this page. If the list below it is empty as well, nobody has written yet.

On the Web chat tab it says something different, and means it: “Website chat needs an assistant.” Website chat is the one channel where nothing arrives without one, because the widget is the assistant’s own snippet — see Can I do this on website chat? below.

My reply says it can’t be delivered

You are outside the 24-hour window and there is no template to fall back on. See the section above. The message can be sent once the customer writes again.

The chip still says “No assistant” after I built one

The thread has not had a message since. Send yourself a test message from that customer’s number, or wait for them to write — see the warning above.

I deleted an old assistant — did I lose those conversations?

No. Deleting an assistant removes the assistant; the conversations it was answering stay in your Inbox with no assistant on them, exactly as described on this page. You can read all of them, and a new assistant picks them up on the customer’s next message.

Replying to one follows the rules above rather than being automatic: you can answer while the customer’s 24-hour window is open, and an older conversation that has been quiet may first need that customer to write again — see the troubleshooting entry above about a conversation that is not linked to one of your connections yet.

The same is true of the number: disconnecting a connector never deletes the history that arrived on it.

Can I do this on website chat?

No. The website chat widget is installed with an assistant’s own code snippet, so a website conversation can only ever start with an assistant behind it — there is no such thing as connecting website chat on its own.

⚠️ And this is the one place where deactivating an assistant does close the surface. Everywhere else on this page, switching an assistant off stops it answering and the number keeps receiving. On website chat the assistant is the surface: the widget stops serving the moment its assistant is deactivated, so nothing new arrives until you switch it back on. If you want a channel to keep receiving while nobody answers automatically, that works on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger — not here.

Existing website conversations can still end up with no assistant on them: deleting the assistant keeps its conversations and releases them, exactly as on the other channels, and the widget itself stops working at the same moment. Those threads stay readable in your Inbox. You cannot reply to them there — website chat is read-only in the Inbox for everybody, assistant or not — see Your Inbox, and taking over.