WhatsApp Interactive Buttons: What a Tap Actually Does

An interactive button is not a link in the message text. It is a separate control rendered under the message bubble, and the three kinds do three different jobs:

• Quick reply — the customer taps it and a short answer is sent back to you as a message. This is the only button type that produces an inbound message.
• Link button — button text plus a target URL. The tap leaves WhatsApp and opens your page. Nothing comes back to your inbox.
• Phone number — the tap starts a call rather than a chat.

In Keaz these sit behind the Interactions toggle on a single message, where Buttons is one of three interaction modes. The other two are Await reply, which pauses the flow until the contact writes free text, and Auto-send, which moves on without waiting for anything. Picking between them is the real design decision; the buttons are what makes the first option worth choosing. The full field list is in our guide to the Messages block in the Flow Builder.

Because a quick reply is a message from the customer, and a message from the customer is what opens the customer service window. The window runs for 24 hours and resets to 24 hours with every further message they send. While it is open you can answer in free text. Once it closes, only an approved template gets through (Meta, WhatsApp Business Platform documentation, retrieved 2 October 2026).

That is why the three button types are not interchangeable. A link button sends the customer to your shop, which may be exactly what you want, but it leaves the window shut. A quick reply labelled "Tell me more" opens a 24-hour lane in which you can answer anything, in your own words, without waiting on template approval. If the point of the message is to start a conversation, give people something to tap that replies to you.

One thing has changed about what that lane costs. Free-text replies inside the window were free until 30 September 2026; since 1 October 2026 Meta charges for them as service messages, with a free tier of 1,000 delivered service messages per business phone number per month (Meta, WhatsApp Business Platform documentation, retrieved 2 October 2026). We cover what moved and what did not in what changed for WhatsApp service messages on 1 October, and every current rate and limit is kept dated on our WhatsApp facts reference. The window still decides the message type; it no longer decides free versus paid.

Keaz shows you the window instead of making you remember it. The inbox runs a countdown in the composer while you type, and when the timer expires the composer switches modes and tells you so — see the 24h reply window in the inbox and what to do once it has closed.

Buttons belong to a single message inside a Messages block, not to the flow as a whole. The path is short:

1. Open the flow in the Flow Builder and click Add block, then Messages.
2. Write the message in the panel on the right. Add media, a headline and a footer if you need them.
3. Switch on the Interactions toggle and choose Buttons.
4. Add your quick replies, then any link button or phone number.
5. Use Test messages to send the whole thing to one contact and look at it on a real phone.

That last step is worth the thirty seconds. The canvas renders each quick reply with the message it leads to, so a button wired to nothing is visible before launch rather than after. The block also carries live Sent, Delivered, Read, Skipped and CTR counters once the flow is running, which is where you find out whether anyone is actually tapping.

Expect a wait before you can switch the flow on. Message content used in a flow has to be approved by Meta first, and until it is, the message carries a WA Pending badge. You can keep editing and saving; you cannot activate. Which template a flow sends is a separate choice, explained in template selection in flows. If you would rather start from something already built, the Keaz flow templates ship with their buttons already wired.

Branching is the obvious job. The useful one is what the tap writes to the contact record. Each quick reply in Keaz carries four settings:

• Button text — what the contact sees and taps.
• Leads to — which message follows the tap.
• Labels — a label written to the contact on tap, so the answer segments your audience without anyone exporting a spreadsheet.
• Change opt-in level — the subscription status the contact moves to, for example Double Opt-In or Unsubscribed.

That fourth setting is the one to think about carefully, in both directions. Because the contact taps the button themselves, a quick reply is a clean place to record a deliberate act: "Yes, send me the drop alerts" is an action the person took, logged with a timestamp, inside a conversation they started. It is also the cleanest place to put the way out. A button that sets the level to Unsubscribed makes withdrawing consent exactly as easy as giving it, which is the standard the GDPR asks for.

A tap is not automatically a valid consent, though. What the wording has to say, what you have to keep and when a second confirmation is needed are separate questions, and we work through them in collecting WhatsApp opt-ins the GDPR-compliant way. This is a summary of how the mechanics work rather than legal advice — have your own counsel review your wording.

Most button problems are one of five things, and none of them is a platform bug:

• Treating a link click as a reply. A link button does not open the window and does not tell you anything in your inbox. If you need the conversation, you need a quick reply.
• Buttons on a cold marketing template. Nice buttons do not fix a list that never opted in. They just collect the block reports faster, and repeated complaints cost you messaging capacity.
• Button text that hides the consequence. "Yes" and "More" tell nobody what they just agreed to. If the tap changes an opt-in level, the label should say what the person is signing up for.
• No way out. If no button and no footer offers a stop, people use the only lever they have left, which is reporting you.
• Planning a launch around a flow still marked WA Pending. Approval is not instant and you cannot activate without it. Build the flow before the campaign date, not on it.

There is a sixth, quieter one: assuming an open window is still free. It was until 30 September 2026. Since 1 October, service replies inside the window are charged beyond a monthly free tier, so a flow that deliberately farms quick-reply taps in order to answer in free text now has a cost attached to it. That is usually still the right trade — it is just no longer a free one.