WhatsApp Business polls: how to ask your customers something and get the answer in one tap
Published on October 30, 2026
Asking twenty customers the same thing and collecting the answers by hand gets old fast.
A WhatsApp poll solves that with one question and options people pick with a single tap.
It works well in a customer group, a class group or your business’s community.
The rules below come from the polls page in the WhatsApp Help Center, with the link in every paragraph.
How to create a poll
On Android, here’s the path, according to the WhatsApp Help Center:
- Open the chat or group.
- Tap the paper clip and then Poll.
- Choose your poll settings.
- Type your question under Question.
- Fill in the answers under Options.
- Tap the paper airplane to send it.
On iPhone, the attach button is the plus sign and you send with the Send button, according to the iOS version of the same page.
The question can be up to 255 characters long, says the Help Center.
You can add up to 12 answer options, each up to 100 characters, according to the official page.
The three settings you pick before sending
This is the part that matters most, because the settings can’t be changed once the poll is created, the Help Center warns.
To change any of them, the only way is to delete the poll and create a new one, according to the same official page.
Here are the three options, according to the polls page:
- Allow multiple answers, which is on by default, and which you turn off so each person votes only once.
- Hide voter names, which shows only the vote counts, without saying who voted for what, not even to you.
- Set an end time, which closes voting at the time you choose.
To pick the day for a class or an event, it’s worth turning multiple answers off so you get a clear winner.
To find out what customers would like to see in your store, leaving multiple answers on gives you a better sense of their preferences.
Editing and deleting
You can edit the question within 15 minutes of creating the poll, according to the WhatsApp Help Center.
The answer options aren’t part of that edit, because the page only mentions the question.
To delete it, tap and hold the poll question, tap the trash can and choose Delete for everyone or Delete for me, according to the official page.
How to see the votes
To see the results, open the chat, find the poll and tap View votes, says the Help Center.
To get notified about each new vote, you need WhatsApp notifications enabled on your phone, says the same page.
To find an old poll, tap the search bar on the Chats tab and use the Polls filter, according to the official page.
Customers can see who voted
With hide voter names turned off, the results screen shows who voted for each option, as the Help Center explains.
In a group of customers who don’t know each other, that shows everyone’s choice to everyone.
If the question touches on something personal, like an appointment time or a type of treatment, turn on Hide voter names before you send it.
How to handle customer data in the chat is covered in our post on LGPD in WhatsApp support, which is about Brazil’s data protection law.
When a poll helps and when it gets in the way
It helps when the same question applies to lots of people, like the date of an event, the flavor of the next batch or the time slot for a class.
It also helps in communities and channels, and our posts on communities in WhatsApp Business and on the WhatsApp Business channel show where it shows up.
It gets in the way when the answer depends on each customer, like a quote, a delivery date or an open slot in your schedule.
In those cases a one-on-one chat works better, because the customer needs an answer about their own case, not a scoreboard.
If the poll doesn’t work
For trouble creating or voting, the Help Center recommends restarting your phone, updating WhatsApp and your phone’s operating system, and switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data, according to the polls page.
Where we come in
A poll gathers lots of people’s opinions at once.
What we do is set up and run the assistant on your business WhatsApp, using your own business content, and that hands the chat to someone on your team when the topic needs a person.