We Gave Our WhatsApp an Assistant

Most of the questions that reach a small business on WhatsApp have the same few answers: how much it costs, what is included, how to get started. Those answers are already on our website, so we taught our WhatsApp to read them.

When a message arrives, our website hears about it straight away and puts it on a short waiting list. If one of us replies from the WhatsApp Business app on our phones, WhatsApp tells our website, and the assistant leaves that conversation alone. If ten minutes pass and nobody has answered, the assistant writes one short reply using only our own pages, adds a link to the page it came from, and marks it "Automatic reply" so nobody ever thinks they are talking to a person. Then one of us picks the conversation up properly when we are free.

The WhatsApp Business app already has away and greeting messages, and they are useful, but they say the same thing to everyone. Someone asking what a website costs at nine in the evening gets "we will get back to you", and they are left waiting for an answer that is sitting on our website.

Our assistant answers the actual question, in English or Bulgarian, with the real price and a link, and it uses the same rules as the question door on our website: it never guesses, never promises results and never talks about anyone else's prices. If our pages do not cover the question, it says we will reply personally soon, which is exactly what an away message would have said anyway.

Because we chose the free route. To let an app send messages from a real WhatsApp number, Meta needs either a partner company that has already been approved, which usually means a monthly fee, or an app that Meta has reviewed itself. We went for the second, so the only cost is the messages themselves, and the first 1,000 replies a month on each number are free.

The review is thorough. Meta asked for an app icon, our privacy policy, a written explanation of how we use each permission, answers about how we handle data, and two short screen recordings showing the assistant working. We have sent all of it and the status now says "Review in progress". It is slower than paying a partner, but we now know every step of it, which is the whole point of the Lab: when we set this up for a client, nothing about it will be new to us.

As little as possible. The text of a waiting message is deleted as soon as it has been answered, a phone number is kept for at most 30 days so the assistant knows whether we have already been chatting, and otherwise we only count how many messages came in and how many were answered each day. There is also a limit of 100 automatic replies a day, so it can never run away with itself. Our privacy page explains it in full.

The day Meta answers, we will say so here, whether it is a yes or a list of things to fix. With a yes, we connect our real number while keeping the WhatsApp Business app on our phones, set the wait to ten minutes, and from then on we add real numbers every month: how many messages it answered, how many it handed back to us, and what we changed on our pages because of the questions people asked.

If you want the same for your business, here is exactly how we set it up, step by step, or we can build it for you as part of a website.