Relay

Docs navigation

Your first 15 minutes

With an account created and WhatsApp connected, here's the fastest path to a real conversation. Each step links to the page that covers it in depth — this is just the shortest route through.

Your dashboard's Quick actions row is a shortcut to three of these: New Contact, New Deal, New Campaign, and New Automation, each jumping straight to the page that owns that "create" flow.

The Quick actions row on the dashboard, with New Contact, New Deal, New Campaign, and New Automation shortcuts highlightedThe Quick actions row on the dashboard, with New Contact, New Deal, New Campaign, and New Automation shortcuts highlighted

  1. Import your contacts. Go to Contacts and click Import (or use the New Contact quick action to add one by hand first). Importing takes a CSV with a required phone column, plus optional name, email, company, and tags columns. See Contacts for the full column reference and what happens with duplicates.

  2. Create or sync a message template. Templates are how you message someone outside the 24-hour reply window (see step 3). Go to Settings → Templates and either build one and submit it to Meta for approval, or click Sync from Meta to pull in templates already approved elsewhere. Approval typically takes about 24 hours. Details: Message templates.

  3. Reply to someone in the Inbox. Open Inbox, pick a conversation, and send a reply. Free-form text and media only send within the 24-hour customer service window — the period after a customer's last message. Once that window closes, the composer shows "24-hour session expired. Use a template to re-engage." and a shortcut to your templates; internal notes are exempt, since they're never delivered to WhatsApp. See Inbox for how the window and assignment work.

  4. Switch on the Welcome Message automation. Go to Automations — Relay ships a Welcome Message template automation (send a greeting, then tag the contact) that fires on a contact's first-ever inbound message. It's created off, like every automation in a fresh workspace, so nothing sends until you turn it on. See Automations for how to enable and edit it.

That's a working inbox, a way to reach people outside the 24-hour window, and an automatic greeting for new contacts. From here, Dashboard tour walks through the rest of the navigation.