Clarification on phone number verification for WhatsApp channel

[obrunsmann]

I have been trying to install WhatsApp integration for some time now, but unfortunately, even after several attempts, I am unable to link my phone number. I am sure that I have made a mistake or misunderstood something fundamental, but my experience may contribute to improving the documentation and should not be understood as a support case.

To add the real phone number, I have now connected the WA Business app and added and verified a phone number in Business Manager.
The company is verified and a payment method has been added.
The app has access to all phone numbers.

Via WA Business App:

Added via Business Manager only (stuck in pending though number is verified):

Nevertheless, Zammad always only receives the test number, never the real phone number. As a test, I connected our business to Intercom, where both phone numbers are selectable—so basically configured correctly.

I would like to see the documentation describe the assignment of the phone number to Zammad in detail again, as I unfortunately cannot find a solution here and the missing step does not seem to be described in the documentation.

[ralf401]

Hi @obrunsmann, thanks for the issue. Not sure if I can help here, just configured it once and it worked. Just in case you read the latest version of the docs, maybe the pre-release version of the documentation is already helpful, there were some changes on Meta's side which got implemented in the docs.

A phone number configuration in Zammad is not necessary. Zammad fetches all available numbers, which are assigned to the app. So I guess there is maybe just a small misconfiguration of your app and/or business account.

Try to check if your number is available in your app configuration like in this screenshot:

I just saw the test phone number in one of your screenshots. Maybe there is a problem in the verification....

If your phone number is available and not marked as unverified, I guess it would be good to open a support request to troubleshoot it.

[MrGeneration]

My experience was that Meta hates you as long as you don't verify your company and have a valid payment option configured.

[obrunsmann]

Hey Guys, thank you for your replies and explainations. So I was working now for two more days on that and trying to understand the facebook/meta nightmare. Finally it got working but with definitively different steps. I checked the pre-release version.

Meta developer app setup / new (?) UI:
The setup UI seems to had received another update (or some weird A/B tests...) so the screenshots in the docs do not match my meta settings and also the process you described with creating the test token seems to be incorrect (see point below) and anyway not working while I still only have access to a test number in the "API-Testing" page of the meta app.

Service account:
I was able to connect meta <> zammad via a service account from the facebook business manager. I had to add everything from both sides (service account on business app, allowing access to whatsapp manager, and adding to meta developer app) and afterwards I was able to create a permanent access token with the required permissions to finally fetch our phone number out of zammad:

Webhook registration:
After all that I still did not receive any messages (saw in http logs that no webhook was incoming) but the "test webhook" worked → verified in the http logs

So I checked

curl --request GET \
  --url https://graph.facebook.com/v24.0/xx/subscribed_apps \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer xx'

and recognized that there was no webhook registered:

{"data":[]}

So I registered the webhooks manually:

curl --request POST \
  --url https://graph.facebook.com/v24.0/xx/subscribed_apps \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer xxx'

And now I do finally receive messages in zammad

{"data":[{"whatsapp_business_api_data":{"link":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/games\/?app_id=xxx","name":"xx Support","id":"xx"}}]}

--

Conclusion:
So assuming I haven't fundamentally misunderstood or overlooked something:

1. The Setup process is outdated because of the necessary creation of service accounts and assignment to app/business/WABA
2. For some reason the webhooks were not registered automatically.