Meta has rolled out usernames on WhatsApp, letting people message businesses using a handle instead of a phone number. Here's how Bik has built support for this into your inbox, so no conversation, context, or customer gets lost along the way.
What is this?
Meta is letting people choose a username and message businesses with it, without sharing their phone number. When someone messages this way, Meta doesn't send us a phone number at all — instead, it sends a Business-Scoped User ID (BSUID), a unique backend ID tied to that person and to your business specifically.
In simple terms: think of a customer walking into a store wearing a name tag instead of giving their phone number. The business can still talk to them, help them, and serve them — it just can't call them back until they choose to share their number.
A few things worth knowing about this ID:
It's scoped to each business. The same person messaging two different businesses gets two completely different IDs — there's no way to match them across businesses.
It stays stable over time, unless the person changes their registered phone number.
It's generated automatically by Meta whenever someone messages using a username — there's nothing to configure on your end.
This only changes things for new conversations from people who choose to message using a username. Anyone whose phone number is already on file is unaffected.
Why we built this?
Without any handling on our end, a conversation from one of these customers would arrive in the inbox as a ticket with no phone number at all. That would mean:
No past orders or ticket history to pull up.
No way to send a shipping update, run a journey, or call back later.
An agent opening the ticket would just see a blank customer panel, with no explanation of why.
Bik's inbox now handles this end-to-end: it flags exactly what's missing, gives the agent a one-click way to ask for the number, and — once it's shared — brings everything together so no history is lost.
How it works
Step 1: The ticket comes in without a phone number
When someone messages using a username, the inbox creates a ticket as usual — but since there's no phone number yet, the customer panel won't show one. The agent can read and reply right away; nothing about the conversation itself is blocked.
Step 2: The agent asks for the number
The agent gets a clear option inside the ticket to send a Contact Info template — a WhatsApp-approved template that asks the customer to share their phone number in one tap.
Step 3: The number arrives
Once the customer shares their number:
The number is saved to their profile.
A new ticket is created, with the phone number now attached.
The older ticket is automatically closed and merged into the new one.
Step 4: Everything stays linked, nothing gets lost
To make sure no context disappears when the ticket changes, the inbox does three things automatically:
On the older ticket — a chat activity note is added saying it's been merged into the new ticket, with the new ticket's ID (e.g. "This ticket has been merged into #1234").
On the new ticket — a chat activity note is added saying the older ticket (with its ID) has been closed and merged into this one.
On the new ticket — a short summary of the earlier conversation is added as a note, so whoever picks it up doesn't need to open the old ticket to know what was already discussed.
An agent landing on the new ticket immediately knows who the customer is, what's already been discussed, and where things left off — without digging through two separate tickets.
For further assistance or to raise feature requests related to username in helpdesk, please contact [email protected]