How can we improve WHMCS?

I think that an adapter approach that allows to add as many providers as possible would be the most beneficial. It means coding the standard and then interfaces to the various partners APIs which differ a little from one another. My doubts are: what if a customer answers the message? As you probably already have a panel somewhere else to read and reply to their answers, we shouldn’t bother about that? The basic implementation would be really easy to be adapted to also send SMS messages as they are less restricted and basically in this use case just reuse the template message with substitution variables concept that WhatsApp uses. What if the admin manager wants to attach media like buttons, images, PDF files to the canned message? I finish my comment with a provocation: are we sure this should be a basic feature and not something that needs to be split in a module? I have modulesgarden’s SMS module and it works fine, but it needed to implement its own panel to manage some features. It may be useful to look at that because the actual shipping of the message is trivial once that panel part is in place, it’s a matter of implementing the various provider API.

We really need this! Please consider implementing

You can also see the videos here:

https://developer.metaconversations.me/

Now it's really easy to add WhatsApp to any system via the new WhatsApp Business Cloud API.

Please add it to WHMCS both as a template approved (by meta) reminders and notifications and both as a multichannel way to communicate with clients via the ticket system.

Please note this new announcement from META - There is a WhatsApp Business Cloud API:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/cloud-api

https://metaconversations.me/

Hi,
Meta / Whatsapp changed the process a lot and beginning May 2, 2022, any businesses can start messaging customers after completing the Embedded Signup or On Behalf Of (OBO) onboarding processes. Business verification and display name review will no longer be needed to get started onto the WhatsApp Business Platform. The WhatsApp account checks will be triggered automatically and conducted asynchronously. After sign-up, your business can:

Respond to unlimited customer-initiated conversations in 24-hour messaging windows.
Send business-initiated conversations to 50 unique customers in a rolling 24-hour period per phone number.
Register up to 2 phone numbers.
Once the sign-up flow is complete and all the business profile information is captured, the certificate will be available for download. With unlimited responses to customer-initiated conversations, your business can immediately respond to customers’ questions, such as recent orders or new products.

See more information here:
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2640149499569241?__cft__[0]=AZVbjM3P_ejCNPnNTC4j-2kKjKPBdN-VzDyGMxIG4J25f7AijFu1wzSKy8ve5kAuVdc24Obr7KKmHgg2F-73006XOQpTpW-oxmVMf4UYSojpvYWWd7BnDyClboFN0nRxcqU8iEXKgD7gvDfhNcvKN4RO0GTE0zpoKPe6233hbUCRaHxgZ2OtMd9nSL1C_om9Sy8&__tn__=-UK-R

Also this is an example on integration done by Pipedrive and WhatsApp by Twilio:

https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/pipedrive-integration-whatsapp-by-twilio

Please do not add this. Unless it can remain completely isolated from the rest of WHMCS. Facebook / META is such a creepy company.

WhatsApp has updated policy, it can be consider for next level.

Most people won't check emails often. And there are barriers like sp@m folder, promotions/notifications tabs, etc.

Some people's email addresses will not receive new emails because they may be full or have other issues.

In any case, people will be checking WhatsApp very often and will be engaging back.

I recently started sending WhatsApp notifications manually only for invoice due reminders, and I started seeing that they are immediately renewing their services compared with the email notifications.

Unlike email, WhatsApp is personal and direct. It has some emotional connections than emails.

This is already doable in so many other similar systems... please do your best to truly investigate it and find a solution to make it part of WHMCS.

is it not possible for whmcs to integrate something like https://www.twilio.com/whatsapp

Here in Italy, strangely, people use WhatsApp so much more than the other messaging systems that some of them do not even know how to read an SMS. That said, even if I would love a native integration and actually use an external module to send SMS messages, WhatsApp seems a little difficult to include, because:

1. People can chat you back, so you would need to be able to answer them into WHMCS
2. There are template messages and session messages, and a 24 hours window for answers
3. People can send and receive multimedia messages like files, voice messages, images and so on, so that would need to be managed somehow

Sigh .. who in their right mind would down vote this one? /facepalm

Yes, I also believe telegram is the way to go with that. We already use it for admin notification.

due to the whatsapp policy being very complicated, you could also receive via SMS, invoices due, and some other notifications, SMS would only use whoever you want but it would be a good resource too.

Basically bring https://whmcs.community/topic/290845-whmcs-notify-extended-stop-relying-on-emails-for-client-area-notifications/ to the core of WHMCS