Guide · Coexistence
WhatsApp Business Coexistence: what it is and how to connect every salesperson's number
Until 2025, putting a WhatsApp number on a platform meant taking it away from the salesperson. Coexistence changed that: the same number lives on the phone and on the platform at the same time.
Updated 22 September 2026
The problem it solves
The WhatsApp Business API has existed since 2018, but it always came with one condition: the number you connect stops working in the phone app. For a contact centre with a brand number, that is fine. For a sales team where every salesperson has their own number and their own book of accounts, it is a non-starter: nobody hands over the number their customers have been writing to for years.
That is why most companies with a WhatsApp sales force never connected anything. The work stayed on the phones, invisible to whoever runs the team.
What Coexistence is
Coexistence, available since mid-2025, is the ability to connect a number that is already in use in the WhatsApp Business app to the API without it stopping on the phone. Conversations sync both ways: what the salesperson types on their phone shows up on the platform, and what the platform sends goes out from their number.
How a line gets connected
- Code on WhatsApp. The salesperson receives a code from Meta in their own WhatsApp Business app. No new number, no new SIM.
- History with Meta. Meta asks the salesperson whether to share up to six months of conversations with the platform. Once, with explicit consent.
- Line live. The number is verified, history starts importing, and the app keeps working exactly as before on the phone.
The whole process takes under two minutes per salesperson and needs nobody from IT.
What the company sees, and what it doesn't
The company sees the commercial conversations on the connected lines: what each customer asked for, what went unanswered, how long each salesperson takes to reply. It does not see the salesperson's personal chats if they use a different number for private life, which is the usual setup with WhatsApp Business.
Only a technology provider authorised by Meta (a Tech Provider) can offer this connection. Frepi is one, and the connection is made directly with Meta, with no intermediary.
What you can do afterwards
- See every line in one place, with each salesperson's real pipeline.
- Understand, with AI, what is slipping: unanswered quotes, demand that never reached a system, follow-ups that went cold.
- Act from the salesperson's number: a follow-up approved by a person, a campaign to the customers who have been waiting 48 hours, or an automatic message when the ERP issues an invoice.
The last point is the one that matters. A report nobody can turn into a message changes nothing. With Coexistence, the action goes out from the number the customer already trusts.
Connect your first line. Free.
One salesperson, two minutes, and this afternoon you see their book in Frepi.
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