WhatsApp's aim is to make sure that the overall experience for the customer is good and that the businesses also maintain a good relationship with their customers.

Your quality rating is based on how messages have been received by recipients in recent days. It is determined by a combination of quality signals from conversations between businesses and users.

The Messaging Tier, Account Health, Account Status for your WhatsApp Business account can be checked from the Broadcast page.

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WhatsApp business API Quality Ratings

If your account is in let’s say Tier 2 or Tier 3 and some customers block or report your number, your account could get into flagged status, your quality could be affected and you may be dropped to the default Tier 1. There are guidelines and processes set by WhatsApp to make sure the customer has control and businesses have time to improve their communication with customers. This way the ecosystem maintains its integrity. 

Under the Account Health column, there are three different quality states:

• Green: High quality
• Yellow: Medium quality
• Red: Low quality

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WhatsApp Business API Account Status

Flagged status: Your account gets flagged when the quality rating reaches a low state. If the message quality improves to a high or medium state and is maintained as it is for 7 days, your status will return to Connected. If the quality rating doesn't improve, your status will still return to Connected, but you'll be placed in a lower messaging limit tier.

Restricted status: Your account gets restricted when you reach your messaging limit. During a Restricted phase, you can’t send any notification messages until the 24-hour window is reset. You can still respond to any messages customers initiate.

How to get back to good account health, and get outside the flagged status

Once the WhatsApp business API account is Flagged, you'll need to maintain a healthy state on the account for at least 7 days before you can work towards upgrading your account.

Hence you need to reduce or completely stop sending notifications that were getting reported or blocked by users. While sending notifications to up to 1000 unique numbers is okay, be sure to send only those messages that won't be reported or blocked by customers, and those that don’t hinder customer experience. Keeping the customer engagement healthy (Incoming chats, and responses) is key during this phase. 

Once the account is back in good health, you can attempt to upgrade the Tiers. 

To Improve your Quality Rating:

• Check if you or anyone from your business has added a template within the last 7 days. This may help determine a problematic template(s).
• Check that your notifications comply with WhatsApp Business APIs commerce policies.
• Evaluate if you have a user opt-in for any recent template topics. 
• For example, if you only have a user opt-in for purchase receipts but use the API for account updates, customers may respond negatively because they didn’t opt-in to that specific communication.
• Review notifications against WhatsApp business API’s template message guidelines.

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