Call switchboard
The switchboard answers two questions about a WhatsApp number: when is it answered, and what happens to the calls that arrive when it is not.
Open it from Settings → Channels → (your WhatsApp number) → Switchboard.
Business hours
Pick a time zone, tick the days you answer calls, and set the hours. Outside those hours nobody's phone rings.
- The opening time counts, the closing time does not: 09:00–18:00 answers a call at 17:59 and not one at 18:00.
- A night shift is written the natural way — 22:00–06:00 runs past midnight.
- Holidays and one-off days replace that date's hours entirely. Tick Closed all day for a holiday, or give the day its own shorter hours.
- A schedule with no open days is ignored rather than closing your number forever, so a half-finished form cannot silence your line.
Your hours are enforced by ConnectWiz itself. That is deliberate: WhatsApp takes up to seven days to show a schedule change on customers' phones, its own settings need Meta's calling review, and the call button is not the only way to reach you. Whatever WhatsApp shows, the hours you set here are the ones that decide.
When your workspace uses working hours
Once your workspace's hours have been moved to the working hours levels, the switchboard no longer keeps a calendar of its own: a line is open when the channel's working hours say so (its own, else its owner's, its department's or the company's). The switchboard shows those hours read-only and keeps what is its own — whether hours are enforced at all, and what happens to a call out of hours. Change the hours themselves in the channel's working hours.
Showing your hours on WhatsApp
Switch on Show these hours on WhatsApp to mirror the same schedule to WhatsApp's own call hours, so a customer sees "closed" before they even dial.
It is a mirror, never the source. If WhatsApp refuses it — a pending review, a voicemail that cannot coexist with call hours — your schedule is still saved and still in force, and the panel tells you that the mirror did not take.
When a call arrives while you are closed
Choose one of three:
Greet the caller and end the call. ConnectWiz answers, plays your own recorded greeting, and hangs up. Nothing is recorded, and nobody's phone rings. Write the greeting in the box below the setting — keep it free of specific dates, because the sentence is recorded once and reused.
The greeting has to be recorded before it can be played. If your workspace has no AI provider key, the panel shows a warning under the text and an out-of-hours call is declined instead of greeted — we never claim a message the caller did not hear.
Decline, so WhatsApp voicemail takes a message. The decline is what triggers WhatsApp's own voicemail, which you configure under Call settings. Without a voicemail on the number, ConnectWiz falls back to the greeting — declining into silence is not a voicemail.
Ring anyway. Your team is rung as usual and the schedule only marks the call as out of hours in reports.
Whichever you pick, the call lands on the customer's conversation with a note, so it is in the inbox to be returned. Leave Also send a written message on and the caller also gets a chat message telling them when you reopen.
Wait queue
When every agent who could take a call is already on one, the new call takes a place in the queue.
- The call still rings — as a call-waiting alert. This is not a compromise: WhatsApp withdraws a number's calling permission after four missed calls, so a queue that silenced the ring would cost you the number.
- When a seat frees up, the customer who has been waiting longest is the one rung, and the ring goes to whoever is actually free at that moment.
- Longest wait ends the wait honestly: past it the call is closed with an explanation and lands in the inbox to be returned. It is capped at 50 seconds because WhatsApp ends an unanswered call itself at around that point.
The panel shows the live queue — how many are waiting, the longest wait, and the order — while the switchboard dialog is open.
What a waiting caller hears depends on whether ConnectWiz answered their call. A call that came through the welcome or the voice menu is already answered, so it can be put on your hold music while it waits. A call nobody has answered has no audio to play into at all, and the caller hears their own ringing tone — answering it just to play music would change what the call is (answered, billed, ring gone), so ConnectWiz does not.
Offer a callback instead of waiting
Switch on Offer a callback instead of waiting and, shortly before the longest wait runs out, the caller is told we are still busy and asked to press 1 to be called back.
- Pressing 1 creates the callback (Calls → Callbacks, due now and unassigned, exactly like the missed-call one), thanks the caller and ends the call — minutes before the wait would have ended it for them.
- Pressing nothing changes nothing: the wait runs to its deadline and ends exactly as it does today.
- One promise, not two. A caller who accepted does not also get the missed-call message afterwards — they have just been told out loud.
- Your hold music is not interrupted by it: the offer pauses the music, plays, and the music resumes by itself.
- Only callers ConnectWiz answered (the welcome, or the voice menu) can be offered anything — a call still ringing on WhatsApp has no audio path to speak into.
The offer needs a channel that can both speak into a waiting call and hear the caller's keypad. Where it cannot, the switch is disabled with the reason on screen: an offer nobody can accept would be worse than none — the caller would press 1 and be hung up on anyway.
After a missed call
A missed call is loud on your side and silent on theirs. Your agents get a push, the wallboard turns red, the call log gets a row — and the person who picked up a phone learns nothing at all: not whether they were heard, not whether anyone will ring back. Two switches under After a missed call answer that.
Message the customer. A reply on the thread the call arrived on. Leave the text empty to use ours, or write your own per language.
- Once per call, and at most once per customer every fifteen minutes. Somebody who redials four times in a minute made four missed calls and gets one reply, not four.
- Not sent when the out-of-hours calendar already handled the call — that path has its own message, with your opening time in it.
- Not offered on a phone line: a voice-only number has no chat thread for the message to arrive on.
Add it to the callback queue. The call becomes a row in the callback list (Calls → Callbacks), due now or after the delay you set.
- Unassigned on purpose. The agent whose phone rang is the one who could not answer it — they may be on another call, or away — and handing them the follow-up is how it gets missed twice.
- A customer who already has a pending callback is not added again, so a redial is one promise rather than four.
- Nothing dials automatically. The row is a reminder; a person presses call.
Both switches are off until you turn them on. An automatic message is still a message sent in your name — billed to your number on WhatsApp, and read as your business by the customer.
Welcome greeting
Some numbers want a greeting and nothing else: "Thank you for calling Acme, connecting you now" — and then the phones ring as usual. That is the welcome, under its own switch.
- The caller is asked nothing. No keys, no menu, no decision.
- Write one sentence. It is played to every caller during opening hours, before anybody's phone rings, so every extra word is time before they reach a person.
- After it, the call rings your team exactly as it would have — the same routing rule, the same escalation, the same wait queue.
The welcome and the voice menu are one or the other. A menu already greets your callers: its own message is the welcome. So while the menu is on, the welcome switch is disabled with that reason on screen, and a save that would leave both on is refused. Switch the menu off if you would rather greet people and put them straight through.
Because a welcomed call is answered by us, the caller stops hearing a ringing tone — so ConnectWiz keeps speaking ("connecting you") while your team's phones ring, just as it does after a menu choice. Recording and the recording notice are unchanged: the notice plays before the greeting, and where your notice cannot be produced at all and your policy requires one, the call is not answered and the greeting does not run.
The welcome needs the same media bridge capability as the voice menu — playing a message into a call before an agent answers. Where it is missing the switch is disabled with the reason on screen, and calls ring your team exactly as they do now.
When callers are told they are being recorded
Callers must be told before you record them, and ConnectWiz will not record a call it could not announce. When they are told is yours to choose, under When the recording notice plays:
- As the call is answered — the default, and what every line does today. The notice comes first, before anything else, and the whole call is recorded: the voice menu included.
- When the conversation starts — the notice plays, and recording begins, at the moment the caller reaches a person or your assistant. The voice menu is neither announced nor recorded.
The second answer exists because a menu is not a conversation. Somebody pressing 1 to hear your opening hours and hanging up has not spoken to anyone, and being announced at — and taped — for that is both odd and more data than you need.
The two halves move together, and they have to. There is no recording without a notice, so holding the notice back also holds the recording back — a caller who hangs up inside the menu is never recorded at all, and a recording that starts "when the conversation starts" is missing the menu by design, not by fault.
If the notice cannot be played for some reason, recording does not start and the caller is still put through. You will see it on the channel's own event log, where the call it happened on is.
This needs a media bridge that can start a recording part-way through a call. Where yours cannot, the choice is shown disabled with the reason: on such a deployment a notice that waited would mean nothing was recorded at all, so the notice keeps playing as calls are answered.
Voice menu
A voice menu asks the caller where they want to go — "press 1 for sales, 2 for accounts" — and rings only that team. One level, no submenus: a caller who has to remember a path through a tree is a caller who hangs up.
Switch it on under Voice menu, write what the caller hears, and map the keys:
- Keys. One row per key, and one meaning per key. A key either rings a department or rings everyone — the escape hatch every menu needs, so a caller who does not fit your org chart still reaches a person.
- If nobody presses anything. The department (or everyone) a call goes to when the caller has no keypad, or simply does not use it.
- Wait for a key. Counted from the moment the menu finishes speaking. A silent window — or a key you did not define — replays the menu once; the second one sends the call to your fallback, so a caller is never stranded.
Use Listen to hear the menu before a customer does.
What the caller experiences
The menu answers the call, which means the caller stops hearing a ringing tone. So once they choose, ConnectWiz keeps speaking to them — "connecting you now" — while your team's phones ring, rather than leaving them in silence.
Business hours come first. Out of hours, the number is closed and the caller gets your out-of-hours answer; the menu never runs. That is deliberate: offering options and then ringing an empty office is worse than saying you are shut.
Recording and the recording notice are unchanged. If the number records calls, the notice plays before the menu, so a recorded call is still announced; if it does not record, nothing from the menu is recorded either.
Every finished call that went through the menu shows one line on its card in the inbox — which key was pressed, and where it sent the call.
The voice menu needs a media bridge that can play a message into a call before an agent answers. If yours cannot, the switch is disabled and ConnectWiz says so: calls keep ringing your team exactly as they do now, and the menu starts working the day the bridge is updated — nothing has to be set up again.