Messages arrive at night and are only read the next morning

A customer who writes at eleven at night is not annoyed that you have not replied. They are annoyed because they do not know whether the message arrived at all. Two automatic sentences solve that, and both are free, included in the subscription, with no AI Operator involved.

Two things you can switch on

• A greeting when someone writes for the first time. Once per person, not on every message.
• An out-of-hours reply, sent when a message arrives outside the days and hours you set.

Setting it up

1. Open the Assistant page in the dashboard. The top card is called Automatic replies and is marked free.
2. Tick what you want and write the wording. Up to 640 characters per message.
3. For working hours, tick the days you are open and fill in the open and close times.
4. Click Save automatic replies.

If you have more than one channel

Running WhatsApp and a website live chat at the same time? Below the hours there is a list headed Applies to channels. A channel left unticked genuinely has its greeting and out-of-hours message switched off. That is deliberate: plenty of businesses want the website live chat to welcome visitors while not re-introducing themselves to WhatsApp customers who already know them.

Writing wording that does not sound like a robot

What separates a reassuring greeting from an irritating one is information. Compare:

Thank you for contacting us.

with

Thanks, we have your message. Our team replies Monday to
Saturday, 8am to 5pm. For anything urgent, call
+62 812 3456 7890.

The second one lets people stop waiting in front of the screen. Say when you reply, and if there is an urgent route, name it.

How it differs from the AI Operator

An automatic reply does not answer questions. It sends the same sentence to everyone, so it cannot answer anything wrongly. If you want customer questions genuinely answered, that is the AI Operator, and the two can run together.

Worried a new customer will still slip through even after being greeted? See new customer alerts, which reach you on WhatsApp when nobody has replied within 10 minutes.