Booking appointments and sign-up forms inside WhatsApp: Meta's ready-made Flow templates, testing a draft, publishing, and why a Flow gets throttled or blocked

Meta's developer blog post on building a simple Flow, dated 14 February 2024, says you don't need to be a developer to start creating Flows: WhatsApp Manager has a no-code builder. Inside message template creation, a drag-and-drop form editor builds the Flow without writing any code. Meta's Flows 101 post, dated 8 November 2023, calls this the simplest way to get started, and says developers build more complex Flows, with conditional logic or branching journeys, in Flow Builder.

The steps in Meta's post:

1. Open templates

In WhatsApp Manager, go to Account tools, then Message templates, then Create template.

2. Pick a category and Form

Choose a category (Meta's example uses Utility), then pick the Form template, name it and choose its languages.

3. Write the message

Write the message body and the text on the button that opens the form.

4. Choose a form type

Choose a form such as Get feedback, then edit its screens and questions. A live preview shows the form as the customer will see it.

5. Submit for review

Save, then Submit. The Flow goes to review, and you can track it in the Status column.

Meta's 14 February 2024 post says the answers customers enter are sent to your business's system.

Meta's Flows 101 post says a Flow can work on its own, or connect to an endpoint: a web address on your business's own system that the Flow talks to while the customer fills it in. Meta says booking appointments requires real-time availability checks and confirmations, so you start by connecting the Flow to an endpoint, which can then show live available time slots. Lead forms and surveys, it says, suit a self-contained Flow.

Meta's lifecycle page sets out the states a Flow moves through:

Draft

Being edited. It can be sent only for testing, and it is the only state in which a Flow can be deleted.

Published

Ready to be sent to real customers.

Deprecated

Permanent. It can no longer be sent to real customers, but it may still be on customers' phones and you may still receive answers from it.

Before publishing, Meta's purchase-interest guide says, all validation errors and publishing checks must be resolved, the Flow must follow Meta's design principles for Flows (summarised in WhatsApp Flows: forms inside the chat), and it must comply with WhatsApp's Terms of Service, the WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy and, if it applies, the Commerce Policy. You publish from the three-dot menu in Flow Builder.

Meta's pages differ on what happens next. The appointment post (27 February 2024) and the purchase-interest guide say you can't edit a Flow once you publish it. Meta's lifecycle page says you can make small changes to a published Flow, which puts it back in Draft. Messages you already sent keep the old version, and only new messages get the change. For big changes, Meta says to create a new Flow by copying the old one, and some older Flows don't support editing at all.

Meta's health monitoring applies only to Flows connected to your own system. Meta watches error rates, how fast your system answers, and whether it is available. If these get significantly worse, Meta may throttle or block the Flow:

Throttled

Customers can still open Flows they already received, but you can send only 10 new Flow messages per hour.

Blocked

If health gets worse still, you can't send the Flow, and customers can't open Flow messages they already received.

Meta says you receive several alerts before a Flow is throttled or blocked. Its fixes: aim for your system to answer in less than 1 second, keep it available and reachable from the internet and answering health checks, and review the errors in the alerts. Recovery is automatic: once your system is fixed, Meta moves a blocked Flow back to throttled, and then to published. For help diagnosing a throttled Flow, Meta points to opening a case in its support portal.

Meta's encryption page says the answers moving between the customer's WhatsApp and your system travel over an encrypted channel. The business generates a pair of keys and shares the public one; with several numbers on one account, the key must be signed for each number.

Meta's versioning page says the versions a Flow is built on can later be frozen or expired. A frozen version can't be used to publish a Flow, though existing Flows can still be sent and opened. An expired version can't be sent or opened at all. In general, Meta says, the period before a freeze or expiry is 90 days from the release of a new version, but it can be shorter, and the freeze can be skipped when a version must expire quickly. Meta's Flows changelog carries the dates.