How a client's WhatsApp account is connected to Convin Sense, what it costs, every step that can silently break it, and two accounts that got banned learning these lessons.
Convin buys the number, Convin dials. No third party can switch it off.
Carrier rules apply, but delivery is not gated on approval.
Deliverability matters; nobody bans the account.
Meta owns the account, approves every template, sets the daily limit and can ban the lot.
Which is why the highest-performing channel in Sense is also the one with the most operational surface area. Everything in this session exists because a third party can refuse.
Meta risk is not an infrastructure concern that engineering absorbs quietly. A banned portfolio stops the client's own marketing and support messages too, which turns a Convin incident into a client-wide outage.
The integration cannot be completed by Convin alone, and cannot be completed by the client alone. Both have to be on the same call.
Partial access to the business portfolio is not enough. Without full admin the flow runs all the way to the final step and then fails, so confirm the client is bringing the right person before the call is booked.
Three levels of containment. Getting the vocabulary right matters because the ban blast radius differs at each level.
The client's top-level Meta entity, verified against their GST and company documents. Convin cannot create one.
What Convin integrates with. A portfolio holds many.
That message stops. Nothing else is affected.
That sender stops. The client's other WABAs keep working.
Every WABA the client owns stops, including marketing and support.
Faster. The number and the payment method are already attached, so it is a straight connection with nothing to set up.
Slower. A new phone number must be procured and verified, and a payment method attached. This is nevertheless the default.
Reuse the client's existing number and two different senders share one WhatsApp thread. The customer sees Physicswallah's own marketing campaign, then immediately: “I am Tara from Physicswallah, would you like to know more about our NEET course?” Same thread, two voices, no explanation.
A separate WABA keeps Convin's outreach in its own thread, with its own display name, its own health score and its own limit. It also means a problem on Convin's sender does not degrade the client's marketing sender.
Nothing is pushed to an endpoint and no metadata is exchanged by hand. It is a connection handshake; the whole flow is built on Convin's side and embedded in the product.
The Facebook step often will not run on a Convin laptop, so drive it from the client's machine. And partial portfolio access fails only at the very end, after everything else is filled in.
Convin Sense is reached at activate.convin.ai, signing in through Microsoft SSO, then entering the organisation ID.
Verify: Session 2 described SSO as Google or Microsoft. Session 3 states Google cannot be used. Confirm before quoting either.
Appears in the recipient's WhatsApp. It is checked against the verified business name on the portfolio, so it has to be the plain company name. “Physicswallah's Max Class JEE Campaign” will be rejected.
Appears in the Meta business manager. Make it unique and specific. Clients routinely end up with ten accounts all called “Convin”, and then nobody can tell which one is wired to which campaign.
| Field | Customer-visible | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Business category | Yes — shown in WhatsApp | Education, automotive, clothing. It is the first line the recipient reads, and for bought lead lists it may be the only clue who is calling. |
| Email address | No | A shared company address, matched to the use case: sales@ for a sales campaign, support@ for a service one. |
| Country | No | Set to the region the numbers will serve. |
| Website | No | The client's own domain. |
| Time zone | Indirectly | Governs when outbound activity is allowed to run. |
Numbers are procured from Exotel, which lists inventory by region. The prefix is not cosmetic: it changes whether the call is picked up at all.
About ₹499 per number per month, recurring. During a pilot Convin absorbs it.
Use the same number for the call and the WhatsApp sender. One identity is more credible than two.
Procurement can be done by the PM directly, or requested from the platform team.
Dial the candidate into Truecaller and look at what it says. Anything already labelled spam, fraud, or another company's name is unusable. There is no API for this, so it is manual, and a Truecaller premium seat is roughly ₹20,000 for 254 whitelisted numbers.
An Exotel number is virtual, not a SIM. Call it and nothing happens. But Meta sends a verification OTP to it, so the number is forwarded to a Convin employee's phone through an Exotel flow, and they read the code back during the call.
Choose the voice-call OTP rather than SMS. The session's experience is that the call arrives reliably and the text often does not.
It caps how many unique customers you may open a conversation with in a rolling day. Replies do not count, and inbound conversations do not count.
They leave the window immediately, freeing a slot. Free-form messages to them are unlimited.
No slot is consumed at all. Inbound conversations sit outside the limit.
The slot stays occupied for the full 24 hours, then the customer counts against the limit again.
If bot messages are not arriving, text the number yourself. An inbound message opens a free-form thread that bypasses the limit entirely, which isolates whether the problem is the limit or something else.
There is no published schedule. Meta raises the tier when it judges the account is sending consistently and not attracting complaints.
WhatsApp Manager → Account tools → Messaging limits. Convin can see this for any integrated client, since the integration carries the account details across.
Some clients are effectively unlimited and need no thought. A newly created account may sit at 250, which a routine 1,000-lead pilot will blow through on day one.
This is a pre-flight check, not a monitoring task. Read the limit before the leads are uploaded.
One of the first Sense clients. The rolling window was not yet understood as a hard constraint.
The lesson taken: check the messaging limit before uploading, and size the first campaign to the account rather than to the client.
The client's card sits on their own WABA and pays Meta directly for every template sent. Convin bills separately for the messages its own model generates.
| Message type | Paid to | Rate | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Utility template | Client → Meta | ₹0.12 | Transactional. Reaches essentially everyone. |
| Marketing template | Client → Meta | ₹0.95 | Promotional. Roughly half the list receives it. |
| Free-form message | Client → Convin | ₹0.50 | Sent inside the 24-hour window. Priced to cover the LLM call. |
Session 2 gave marketing as ~₹0.90 and Session 3 as ₹0.95, and the speaker then corrected himself mid-sentence toward ₹0.15 for a template. The free-form ₹0.50 is new in Session 3. Treat all three as approximate until confirmed.
Debit cards fail more often. Money frequently does not get debited at all.
There is no monthly invoice date to plan around. Debits happen when Meta decides.
Sending has been blocked over an outstanding ₹3, and also over ₹5,000. The trigger is unpredictable.
Where the exposure concentrates: marketing templates. At roughly ₹0.95 each, and up to three sends per lead before a reply, a 1,000-lead campaign accrues a real balance within days. Utility-only pilots rarely reach the threshold, which is why the problem tends to appear only at full deployment.
Infosec review, no single person authorised to attach a card, and often a corporate credit line instead. Expect this to take time and involve their finance team.
Frequently the founder's own card, added on the call. Convin has also put its own CEO's card on client accounts to unblock a pilot, since the pilot spend is only a few hundred rupees.
A card can be attached as default or backup. A single card added as backup will never be charged. Always set default.
Marked optional in the Meta form. It is not. Leave it blank and messages will not send.
Karix and AiSensy among others front the payment and bill the client, which removes the auto-debit failure entirely.
Adding the card triggers an OTP to whoever owns it, so make sure that person is reachable at the moment the integration call reaches this step.
A blocked WABA can be appealed. Meta's review is largely automated, and a first appeal is often granted.
Appeal, then resume the same behaviour, and Meta bans the whole portfolio. There is no second review.
The phone number sits at pending or in progress rather than connected. Nothing errors loudly; messages simply never leave.
Always 123456. It is a constant, not something generated per account, and it does not need to be requested from anyone.
This is not a step the client needs to be present for. It can be completed afterwards by anyone on the Convin side with access to the integration.
Hi {{1}}, I am reaching out regarding your recent purchase of {{2}}. Can we speak now to know more about it?
| Name | A working label. Internal only. |
| Category | Utility, marketing, or authentication. |
| Variables | Double braces. Each needs an example value. |
| Description | Plain English: what belongs in this slot. |
| Data mapping | Bind straight to a CRM field. |
Point the variable at a CRM field using the exact format CRM_metadata.age. No model involved, so no room for it to guess wrong.
Leave the mapping empty and the LLM fills the slot from the conversation, guided only by the description you wrote.
When the answer is “template”, the generated response is not sent as written. It is handed to the template, and the model has to decide which fragment of its own output belongs in which numbered slot.
The model sees a response and a template and is left to infer the pairing. The session reports substantial inaccuracy here.
“The vehicle the customer purchased” tells the model exactly what to look for. Accuracy improves because the ambiguity is removed at authoring time, not at inference time.
A three-word description is the cheapest reliability improvement available anywhere in the product.
Thirty seconds to twenty minutes is normal. A full day happens. It is not queue depth, it is the account's disciplinary history.
Templates cannot be edited from the Convin dashboard. Change them in Meta and they re-enter review.
An approved utility template can be downgraded to marketing later if recipients complain, then paused.
Pilots are small enough that a handful of utility templates can be crafted to qualify legitimately. At full deployment the use cases are broader, categories are mixed, and marketing rates apply. That is the moment cost jumps and the payment problems in section 5 surface.
Not everyone has access to the client's Meta business page, so the essentials are mirrored into Convin under Manage.
The account health signal. The thing to watch daily.
The current rolling-window tier.
Whether the display name cleared review.
Green, yellow or red for the sender.
Messages sent and delivered, summarised over the last 24 hours.
Per template: approved, pending, downgraded, paused.
This view is an account-level summary. Per-campaign performance lives in campaign analytics, which is where you go to explain a specific campaign's numbers rather than the account's health.
The first message is always plain text. After that, documents and images can be sent.
Configured under AI messages → media files: upload the file, then write a trigger condition in plain language. Deciding whether the condition is met is itself an LLM call, so the attachment fires only when the conversation warrants it.
WhatsApp activity shows templated and non-templated messages attempted, delivered and failed, with a reason against each failure.
Roughly seven to eight distinct Meta errors recur in practice: payment, marketing limits, template state and others. Reading them is the subject of the next session.
Convin does not currently send images or documents as a matter of course, but it does analyse inbound ones. The outbound capability exists for cases like sending a service document mid-conversation.
Access to the app organisation has been granted to everyone. Work through the platform, then post questions in the Convin Sense training channel rather than saving them for the next call.
| Symptom | Likely cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing sends after a fresh integration | Certificate not registered | Number shows pending, not connected. Register with PIN 123456. |
| Sending stops after a few days live | Card auto-debit failed | Check the WABA payment settings. Clear the balance, set the card as default. |
| Part of a campaign fails on day one | Rolling window exhausted | Read the messaging limit. Size the batch to the account, not the client. |
| Messages send but few arrive | Marketing category, or a degraded template | Check template category and quality rating. Utility where the context allows. |
| Delivery falls over time | Account health dropping | Watch quality rating in Manage. Pause before Meta forces the issue. |
| Nothing sends, no obvious cause | GST field left blank | It is marked optional in Meta and is not. Fill it in. |
| Calls not answered at all | Number is spam-flagged or non-local | Re-check in Truecaller. Prefer a regional prefix matching the lead base. |
| Risk | “What is the biggest operational risk in Sense?” | Meta. A banned portfolio takes down the client's own marketing and support senders, not just Convin's outreach. | 05 · 18 |
| Incident | “Tell me about something that went wrong.” | Loadshare: a new portfolio at a 500 limit, 1,000 leads uploaded, banned for 10–15 days. The control that came out of it is a pre-flight limit check. | 14 |
| Judgement | “Snabbit got banned. Whose fault, and what would you change?” | Not a settings failure. Wrong offer, wrong list, and a rebuttal that made it worse. Fix targeting and message framing. | 19 |
| Economics | “Why does the client pay Meta separately?” | Template delivery is Meta's charge. Convin bills only for free-form messages, which cover the LLM call. | 15 |
| Diagnosis | “A client says WhatsApp stopped. First three checks?” | Card auto-debit, certificate registration, rolling-window limit. In that order. | 27 |
| Depth | “What would you automate first?” | Truecaller vetting. It is manual, per number, and there is no API, so it is a product-ops problem rather than a script. | 11 |
| Utility template | ₹0.12 | client → Meta |
| Marketing template | ₹0.95 | verify; S2 said ~₹0.90 |
| Free-form message | ₹0.50 | paid to Convin |
| Number rental | ₹499 / mo | per number, Exotel |
| Truecaller premium | ₹20,000 | 254 whitelisted numbers |
| Starting limit | 250 / day | a brand-new WABA |
| Reachable limit | 2,000 / day | in about five days |
| Certificate PIN | 123456 | constant, never generated |
| Integration call | ~10 min | with the right admin |
| Utility approval | ~1 in 1,000 | for a real sales use case |
Portfolio the client's top-level Meta entity. · WABA a WhatsApp Business Account inside it; what Convin integrates with. · Rolling window unique customers you may initiate with per day. · BSP a provider such as Karix or AiSensy that fronts payment on a credit line.
Each of these is stated differently across the two sessions, or corrected mid-sentence by the speaker. Confirm them internally rather than picking one.
Session 2: SSO via Google or Microsoft.
Session 3: “We cannot log in through Google.” Microsoft only.
Ask which is current. It is the first thing you would do on the job.
Session 2: approximately ₹0.90 per message.
Session 3: ₹0.95, then “cross check this number, what we charge is 0.15 for a template.”
Three figures, one message type. Get the real card rate before using it in an argument.
Session 2: not mentioned.
Session 3: ₹0.50 per message, billed by Convin rather than Meta, to cover the LLM call.
New information. Worth confirming it applies to every free-form send.