Taking bookings on WhatsApp Business
Most local businesses here already run on WhatsApp. The question is what happens when the messages arrive faster than you can answer them.
The free WhatsApp Business app gives you a business profile, a catalogue, labels, and canned quick replies. For a business with a handful of messages a day, that is genuinely enough, and nobody should be sold anything more.
Where it stops is automation. Away messages and greeting messages are fixed text: they cannot read your diary, cannot quote your price for the thing being asked about, and cannot hold a conversation. The app also lives on one phone, so two people answering means two people passing a handset around.
The step up is the WhatsApp Business Platform, which lets a system send and receive on your number properly. It comes with rules worth knowing before you plan around it: you can reply freely inside a window that opens when the customer messages you, and outside that window you can only send message templates that Meta has approved in advance. Reminders and confirmations are written as templates for exactly this reason.
That constraint shapes what is worth building. Answering an enquiry, quoting from your real prices, and booking the slot all happen inside the customer window and are unrestricted. The reminder that goes out the day before is a template, approved once, then sent for every booking after that.
Tell me what you are losing.
Thirty minutes on a call. I will tell you what we would build, and honestly whether it is worth it.