WhatsApp API: Support Advanced Functions for Interactive Session Messages
A
Alyaa See
Merged in a post:
Add support for WhatsApp Interactive List Messages
Noe Gensse
Respond.io currently only supports Quick Replies for WhatsApp, which are capped at 3 options. The WhatsApp API natively supports Interactive List Messages (up to 10 options grouped into sections), which is one of the two standard interactive message types defined by Meta. This feels like a baseline WhatsApp capability, not an advanced one, and it's a real blocker for anyone building menu-driven flows on Respond.io.
Concrete example: on a current client project (B2B training provider), users need to pick a course from ~8 options. With Quick Replies limited to 3, the only workarounds are chaining multiple Quick Reply steps (poor UX, drop-off) or asking users to reply with a number matching a plain-text list (error-prone, no structured capture). A native List Message would solve this in one step with a clean UI and clean variable capture.
Important: this feature needs to be available for free-form session messages inside the 24-hour customer service window, not only for WhatsApp message templates. List Messages are fully supported by Meta in session messages, so requiring a template (and paying the template/marketing rate) for a message that's already within the 24h window would be absurd and would make the feature unusable in most real conversational flows.
What I'm asking for, concretely:
- A new step (or an extension of Quick Replies) in the Workflow builder mapping to the WhatsApp interactivemessage type withtype: list
- Header (optional), body, footer (optional), button label
- Up to 10 sections, each with a title
- Up to 10 total rows across sections, each with row ID, title, and description
- Capture of the selected row ID into a workflow variable for branching and routing
- Usable in normal session messages within the 24h window, not restricted to templates
Santiago Infante
To send location with a buttom