The problem
Customers message on WhatsApp at all hours: late at night, on weekends, while you are busy with someone else. They ask the same things again and again: prices, opening hours, availability, directions, how to pay. If nobody answers soon, many of them message the next business on the list.
Answering everything by hand has a cost that is easy to miss. Someone on your team spends hours glued to the phone, answers change depending on who replies, and half-finished conversations are forgotten. Nobody gets back to the customer who asked on Tuesday and never wrote again.
A bot with fixed replies does not solve it either. If the customer asks something outside the menu, the bot gets stuck or answers nonsense. And a poorly built AI assistant is worse: it can make up a price or promise a room that is not available.
What it does
A WhatsApp AI assistant is a program that reads your customers’ messages, understands what they are asking and replies with your business’s real information. It does not follow a button menu; it holds a conversation.
My work here builds on the multi-company assistant platform I developed at AI Solutions CR, where I work as a systems integration engineer. That platform is built to serve several companies at once over WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, web and phone, and keeps each company’s data separate from the others. The rules I apply to every assistant come from that work:
- It answers with your data, not guesses. Prices, availability and terms come from your business’s information. Critical rules are checked in the system’s code, not only in the AI’s instructions, so it does not invent prices or availability.
- It hands the chat to a person. You or someone on your team can take over any conversation. While a person is handling it, the assistant stays silent.
- It follows up. It can pick a conversation back up at a set time and send scheduled messages, so a customer who was still deciding is not lost.
- It asks for your approval when it should. Anything that needs your sign-off, such as a quote, does not reach the customer until you approve it.
- Payments are verified by a person. The assistant never marks a payment as received on its own.
- It keeps a record. Every important action is logged, so you know what each customer was told and when.
The assistant answers on a dedicated WhatsApp number for your business, which I set up and manage. Before we start, I explain the rules WhatsApp sets for automated messages. You decide with that information in hand.
If you also get a lot of phone calls, the same approach exists for the phone: see voice assistants.
How it works
- Diagnosis. We look at where your customers message you from, what they ask most, which answers depend on changing data and when a person needs to step in.
- Proposal. I show you what the assistant will answer, what it will not, when it hands the case to your team and how it connects to WhatsApp. You decide before we start.
- Build. I load your business information, write the rules and test the assistant with real conversations from your customers before it goes live.
- Launch. We switch it on with your team alongside. Your staff learns to take over a chat when needed.
- Support. I watch how it answers day to day and adjust it for new questions, price changes and seasons.
I work remotely with companies across Costa Rica. You can see the rest of my work on the projects page.
Who it is for
It suits businesses that get many similar questions on WhatsApp and lose customers by not answering in time:
- Tour operators, lodges and agencies that hear from travelers at all hours.
- Repair shops and technical service companies that send quotes and schedule visits.
- Clinics and practices that book appointments and explain treatments.
- Restaurants, cafés and sodas that take reservations and get questions about the menu.
- Companies with several branches or brands that want every customer served the same way.
It is not a good fit if you get only a few messages a day and answer them well yourself. It is not a fit either if your business information is not written down anywhere and changes without order: the first step then is to organize it, and the assistant comes after. And it is not for anyone who wants to send mass messages to people who never asked to be contacted.