What is a WhatsApp poll?

In more depth

Polls are the most useful structured input WhatsApp gives an automation, because everything else arrives as free text that has to be interpreted. A poll turns a question into a machine-readable answer: you send the options you can handle, and the vote event tells you which option a specific participant chose. That makes them ideal for scheduling, for RSVPs, for satisfaction checks and for any branch where you would otherwise ask someone to reply with a number and then handle the six ways people get that wrong. There are limits worth knowing before you design a flow around them. The option list is capped, votes can be changed after the fact so your counter must be idempotent on the voter rather than additive, and a vote can fail to register on the sender's side, which surfaces as a separate failure event. In group polls the voter may arrive as a linked identity rather than a phone number, so resolve identities the same way you would for any other group event.

In the Wapito API

On the wire it is the field poll:

{
  "poll": {
    "title": "Which slot suits you?",
    "options": [
      "Tue 10:00",
      "Wed 14:00"
    ],
    "multiple": false
  }
}

On the official Cloud API

The Cloud API offers interactive list and button messages for structured replies, but a business-initiated one outside the customer service window still has to be a pre-approved template.

Wapito is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or certified by WhatsApp or Meta Platforms, Inc. WhatsApp is a trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc.

Related terms

• Reaction
• ACK
• Webhook

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