When a prospect messages your WhatsApp number, your backend captures their number, tags them, and logs the conversation in your CRM, automatically, before your team even sees it.
WhatsApp is often the first touch in markets where it dominates, LATAM, South Asia, the Middle East. But most teams handle inbound WhatsApp manually, which means slow response times, missed leads, and no audit trail.
WABridges delivers every inbound message to your backend as a webhook. From there, you can create or update a CRM contact, tag the lead source, assign an owner, and trigger a follow-up sequence, all before a human needs to respond.
We keep the number online and hand you every event. You write the part in the middle.
Put the WABridges number on your landing page, ads, or business card as your contact channel. Prospects message it directly.
The first message from any new number hits your webhook. You get the sender's phone number, message body, and timestamp.
Check if the number exists in your CRM. If not, create a new contact with the phone number, lead source tag, and first message as a note. If yes, log the new activity.
Reply immediately with a message like "Thanks for reaching out! We'll get back to you within an hour." This alone improves conversion rates.
Every loop below is the one above with your own logic in the middle.
Copy this prompt, paste it into any AI assistant, get working code in your language.
I want to capture inbound WhatsApp leads into my CRM using WABridges.
My stack: [Node.js / Python / Ruby, update this]
My CRM: [HubSpot / Airtable / Pipedrive / custom DB, update this]
My setup:
- WA_API_KEY: my WABridges API key
- Bridge customer_ref: "leads"
- CRM_API_KEY: my CRM API key (env var)
I need:
1. A POST /webhook endpoint that receives inbound WhatsApp messages
2. On first message from a number:
- Create a new contact in [my CRM] with phone, lead_source: "whatsapp",
first_message, and received_at timestamp
- Send an instant reply: "Hi! Thanks for reaching out. We'll get back
to you within 1 hour."
3. On subsequent messages from the same number: log as a new activity/note
on the existing contact (don't create a duplicate)
4. On any error creating the CRM record: still reply to the prospect,
log the error, and store the raw payload to retry later
Please read the WABridges API docs before writing:
https://wabridges.com/llms-full.txt
Keep the webhook handler under 60 lines. Show the CRM call as a
separate createOrUpdateLead() function I can swap out easily.
What you get on the WhatsApp side, whatever you build on yours.
Other guides that build on the loop you just read.
Choosing a provider? See how WABridges compares to Twilio, 360dialog, and other WhatsApp API providers.