Handling custom furniture enquiries on WhatsApp: sizes, photos, and quote follow-up

What furniture enquiries look like

• “How much is this?” with a screenshot from Instagram
• Requests for custom dimensions, colours, or materials
• Questions about delivery areas, timing, and installation
• Requests to visit the showroom or see samples

Many of these need a person eventually. The problem is the first reply and the information gathering, which can take several messages before anyone can give a real answer.

What an agent can handle first

An agent can answer standard questions from approved information: catalogue prices that may be shared, delivery areas, showroom location, and opening hours. For custom requests, it can collect the details the team needs — dimensions, preferred material, photos of the space, delivery area — and create a quote request for a person.

Handling photos and screenshots

Customers often send an image instead of a product name. Unless image recognition has been scoped and tested for your catalogue, the safer approach is to acknowledge the image, ask one clarifying question, and route it to the team with the conversation summary.

Quote follow-up

Furniture purchases often involve a long gap between the quote and the decision. A follow-up after a few days, then another later, can bring customers back, especially if each message offers something useful such as a showroom visit or fabric samples. Stop on reply or opt-out. Within 24 hours of a customer’s last message, businesses can reply normally; after that window, business-initiated messages require an approved WhatsApp template, so plan a template for quote follow-ups. See WhatsApp lead follow-up automation.

Showroom visits and orders

Booking a showroom visit, sending a reminder, and noting what the customer wants to see helps the team prepare. After an order, status updates on production and delivery reduce “any news?” messages.

Example flow (illustrative): a custom sofa enquiry

• A customer sends an Instagram screenshot of a sofa and asks for a different length
• The agent confirms the model if it can identify it from approved catalogue names, or asks which model they mean
• It collects the required length, preferred fabric, delivery area, and a photo of the space if the customer is willing
• A quote request with those details is created and assigned to the sales team
• After the quote is sent, a follow-up is scheduled and stops if the customer replies
• If the customer books a showroom visit, a reminder goes out the day before

Keeping it in one pipeline

A furniture pipeline usually has stages such as enquiry, measurements needed, quote sent, deposit received, in production, and delivered. Recording these in one CRM is what makes follow-up and status updates possible; see designing a CRM your team will actually use. The industry workflow is described on AI automation for furniture businesses, and kitchen and interior studios are covered on kitchen remodeling automation.