WhatsApp, Instagram and web chat, one inbox

Here is a day that will sound familiar to anyone running a small brand in India. A customer in Pune comments “do you ship to Pune?” under last night’s reel. Nobody sees it until the next morning, because the person who runs the Instagram account is also the person who runs the shop. By then a second customer has sent the same question on WhatsApp, and a third has typed it into the little chat bubble on the website and left.

Three questions. Three apps. Three people who might answer, or not.

From today, all three land in one Conecxt inbox.

The channel filter in the inbox. One list, three doors in.

What arrives in the inbox now

WhatsApp, as before. Your official business number on the WhatsApp Business Platform, with templates, campaigns and the journey builder behind it.

Instagram, new. Connect your Instagram professional account through its Facebook Page and two things start arriving: Direct messages, and comments on your own posts and reels. A comment shows up as its own conversation, tagged Comment, with a card of the post it was written under so the team knows what the customer is looking at.

Web chat, new. A chat widget on your own website. A visitor types, the conversation appears in the inbox, and when they tell you who they are, the chat attaches to their contact record like any other.

Each conversation still has one owner, so two people never reply at once. Notes, tags, assignment, @mentions, saved views and the resolve flow are the same for all three. The contact record is one record: the person who commented on your reel on Tuesday and messaged you on WhatsApp on Thursday is the same person in Conecxt.

Answering an Instagram comment, properly

Instagram comments are public, which is why most teams either ignore them or answer with “DM us”. The inbox gives you the full set of moves Meta allows, from one screen:

What you want to do	In Conecxt
Answer where everyone can see it	Reply publicly: one public reply under the comment, posted as your account
Take the conversation private	Reply privately: one Direct message to the commenter, within Meta’s 7-day window. It arrives in their Instagram inbox linked to the comment, and the thread continues as a normal DM
Deal with spam or abuse	Hide or Unhide the comment. Hidden comments stay visible to the person who wrote them, and to nobody else
Remove it for good	Delete, after a person confirms. The inbox keeps a record that the comment existed
Acknowledge without typing	Like or Unlike the comment from the same menu

The “do you ship to Pune?” comment from the top of this page took four clicks: a public “Yes, 2 to 3 days”, a private message with the delivery price list, and the sale moved to WhatsApp where the order was placed.

When Meta’s own inbox is in the picture

Many businesses also answer Instagram from the Meta Business Suite app on a phone. Meta decides which app holds a thread at any moment, and a thread held by Meta’s inbox cannot be answered from anywhere else.

Conecxt shows this rather than hiding it. A held thread gets a banner, “Thread is with Meta inbox (another app)”, the composer pauses, and a Take control button moves the thread back to Conecxt. The reverse works too: hand a thread to Meta’s inbox when a colleague prefers the phone.

The automations already know

Nothing about the journey builder, assignment rules or AI agents is channel-specific. A rule that sends new enquiries to the sales team applies whether the enquiry came in by WhatsApp, Instagram or the website. An AI agent attached to a channel answers that channel’s conversations, and stays off everywhere else until you decide otherwise.

Broadcast campaigns stay on WhatsApp, because that is where Meta’s template system and the opt-in rules live. Instagram and web chat are for conversations customers start.

Where this leaves a small team

Take a kurta boutique in Jaipur with two people answering customers between everything else they do. Before: an Instagram account on one phone, a WhatsApp Business app on another, a contact form that emails the owner. After: one inbox on one screen, every enquiry with a name against it, and the owner can see at 6 pm what was asked and what was answered.

That is the whole point. Not more channels. Fewer places to look.

Getting it switched on

WhatsApp and web chat are available in every workspace now. Instagram is being enabled workspace by workspace while Meta’s app review of our Instagram permissions completes; if you want it, tell us and we will switch it on for yours and walk your team through connecting the account. Connecting takes a Facebook login and about two minutes.