Before you put AI on WhatsApp: a practical planning checklist

This guide covers the planning decisions. For what Veyrox builds on WhatsApp and how the stack fits together, see the WhatsApp AI automation service page.

Decide what the agent should handle

Read through a week of real WhatsApp conversations and sort them. Typically you will find repeated questions (prices, location, availability, delivery), new sales enquiries, existing-customer support, and messages that need a person. Start the agent on the first two groups. Leave complaints and anything sensitive with your team.

Write the approved answers

An agent is only as accurate as what it is allowed to say. Write short approved answers for common questions, list the prices or packages that may be shared in a message, and list the topics that must always go to a person. Review these with whoever owns sales.

Plan after-hours behaviour

Many enquiries arrive in the evening. Decide what the agent does when the team is offline: answer what it can, collect the details needed for a follow-up, and tell the customer clearly when a person will reply. Avoid promising a callback time the team cannot keep.

Make handoff explicit

• List the triggers: unapproved price questions, complaints, legal or payment disputes, repeated confusion
• Decide who receives the handoff during and outside working hours
• Include a short summary so the customer does not repeat themselves
• Tell the customer a person is taking over

Log everything somewhere useful

If conversations stay only inside WhatsApp, you still cannot see your pipeline. Each serious enquiry should become a record in your CRM with its source, a summary, and a stage. Veyrox writes these into a custom CRM it builds for the business; see why CRMs get abandoned and how to design one.

Consent and messaging rules

WhatsApp’s Business Messaging Policy says a business may only message people who have given it their phone number and have opted in to receive messages from that business, and that every request to stop or block must be respected. Reply to people who contacted you, send follow-ups only to people who agreed to them, and stop when someone asks you to.

Plan around one platform rule as well: within 24 hours of a customer’s last message, businesses can reply normally. After that window, business-initiated messages require an approved WhatsApp template. Write the templates you will need, such as a follow-up or a booking reminder, before launch. Veyrox connects WhatsApp through an official WhatsApp Business Solution Provider; we don’t build direct integrations with Meta’s Cloud API ourselves.

Common mistakes

• Launching without approved prices, so the agent stalls or improvises
• Answering in formal Arabic when customers write in Egyptian Arabic
• No handoff, so frustrated customers loop with the bot
• No follow-up, so the agent replies quickly but leads still go cold

Language and tone are covered in conversational AI in Egypt, and follow-up timing in WhatsApp lead follow-up automation.