WhatsApp voice calls

WhatsApp calling turns your WhatsApp Business line into a phone line your team answers from the browser. Customers tap the call button in your chat and the call rings in the Ciarem Inbox. When a customer has allowed it, your team can call them back from the same conversation. Every call lands in the thread afterwards as a card with its recording, transcript, and an AI summary, so a phone call leaves the same record as a chat. This page covers what you need and how to set the line up. Answering and placing calls is in Calls in the Inbox.

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What you need

• A dedicated WhatsApp Business line connected to Ciarem. Lines connected with Coexistence cannot use it. Calls to those numbers keep ringing in the WhatsApp Business app on your phone, and the Voice calling tab says so.
• A messaging limit of at least 2,000 recipients per day on the line. This is Meta’s rule: turning calling on for a smaller line fails until Meta raises its limit. The settings tab warns you when the line is below the bar.
• Admin role in Ciarem to change the settings.
• To call customers (as opposed to receiving calls), the line must not be based in the United States, Canada, Egypt, Vietnam, or Nigeria. Meta does not allow business-initiated calls from those countries. Receiving calls works everywhere.

Calling also needs the customer’s WhatsApp to be reasonably up to date, which is out of your hands. If it is not, Meta rejects the call and Ciarem shows the reason.

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Turn it on

WhatsApp can take up to 7 days to show a change to customers, even though your line honours it immediately. Do not expect the call button to appear on customers’ phones the same day.

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Recording and transcription

Two switches decide what Ciarem keeps from a call:

• Record calls saves the audio so anyone can play it back from the conversation.
• Transcribe calls turns the call into a time-aligned transcript and an AI summary in the chat.

Both are performed by WhatsApp during the call, and WhatsApp handles the disclosure. Before recording starts, it reads a short announcement aloud to both sides, in the Announcement language you choose (Spanish, English, or Portuguese), stating what you tell customers the recording is for. Keep that purpose short and plain, for example “quality and customer service”, because it is the sentence your customer hears. The tab previews the exact wording. If you turn both switches off, nothing is captured and no announcement plays. Recording and transcript arrive a minute or two after the call ends. See After the call for how they show up.

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Voicemail

Turn on Take a voicemail so a call nobody takes does not simply drop. Choose when to offer it (when the call is declined, when nobody answers in time, or both) and how many seconds the call rings before giving up (10 to 60; the default is 20). Upload a greeting as an .ogg (Opus) clip under 60 seconds. The caller hears it, then leaves a message. The voicemail arrives in the conversation as an ordinary voice note, with the same Transcribe action as any other, right after the missed-call card. Nothing else is needed on your side. Not answering has consequences beyond a lost call. WhatsApp hides the call button on lines with a sustained low pickup rate, and pauses outbound calling for a week on lines that collect blocks or reports. Turning voicemail on from day one is the simplest protection.

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Permission to call customers

Receiving calls needs nothing from the customer. Calling them does: WhatsApp only connects a business-initiated call to someone who has allowed it, and permission is theirs to grant, for 7 days or permanently. There are three ways to get it, all covered in Calls in the Inbox: the Ask to call message, the Ask to call back prompt when they call you, and a Call on WhatsApp button in a message template. Two limits to know before you plan an outbound campaign. You can send one permission request per 24 hours and two per 7 days to the same person. WhatsApp allows 5 connected calls per 24 hours with the same person and 100 per day on the line. After two unanswered outbound calls in a row, WhatsApp asks the customer whether to keep allowing calls; after four, permission is revoked.

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What it costs

Meta’s pricing, passed through your WhatsApp wallet like everything else on the channel:

• Calls customers make to you are free, whatever the length.
• Calls you place are billed by Meta per second, in six-second steps, at a per-minute rate that depends on the customer’s country. In most of Latin America it is around one US cent per minute. When the wallet cannot cover a call, Ciarem refuses to dial (“Couldn’t place the call”) but keeps receiving calls, so a billing problem never cuts your customers off.
• Ask to call messages are ordinary WhatsApp messages and follow the 24-hour window rules.

One useful side effect: a customer calling you, even if nobody answers, opens or refreshes the 24-hour customer service window, so the follow-up can be a free-form message rather than a template.