Added per-trigger audience targeting (new lead vs saved contact) to auto-replies — solving the "same welcome message to everyone" problem
24 June 2026 at 23:24
Sharing a feature pattern that fixed a real annoyance for WhatsApp-based sales/support.
The problem with most WhatsApp auto-reply setups: every trigger fires for everyone. A long-time customer who just says "hi" gets the same new-customer welcome blast as a stranger. Spam/ad numbers get a full automated greeting nobody asked for.
The fix was giving every trigger an audience:
- Not saved (fresh lead) → welcome + catalog
- Saved (existing contact) → exclusive offer, or nothing at all
- All when it genuinely applies
Two things that were harder than expected to get right:
- It fires on closed conversations, straight from the chat list — the user never opens the chat. System detects on its own whether the contact is in the address book.
- A per-contact cooldown so someone who messages repeatedly doesn't get the same auto-reply 5 times.
Curious how others here handle segmentation on inbound auto-replies — do you branch by contact status, by keyword, by funnel stage? (I build Lyra, a CRM that runs inside WhatsApp Web — happy to share details if useful.)
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