The first 30 answers: what to teach a WhatsApp assistant before launch

Most WhatsApp assistants that disappoint were not badly built. They were badly briefed. The model can hold a conversation in any language your customers write in; what it cannot do is know your prices, your opening hours or what you do when an order arrives damaged, unless someone wrote that down first.

The short answer

Before launch, write the thirty answers your customers ask for most, in your own words, with the exact figures and the exact limits. Add a clear rule for when the assistant hands over to a person. Thirty well-written answers cover most of what a small business is asked on WhatsApp; the rest should go to a human, quickly and politely.

Why thirty, and not three hundred

Customer questions on WhatsApp follow a steep curve. A handful of questions (price, location, hours, availability, delivery) make up the bulk of every day’s messages. After those comes a long tail of one-off questions that no list will ever fully cover.

Thirty is roughly where that curve flattens for a small or mid-size business. Past that point each new answer covers fewer conversations, costs the same effort to write and keep current, and adds one more thing that can go out of date. A short list that is accurate beats a long one that is half stale.

The number is also a discipline. If you cannot choose thirty, you do not yet know what your customers ask, and the first job is to find out, not to write.

Where to find the real questions

Do not write the list from memory. Owners reliably guess the questions they wish customers asked. The real list is already sitting in your phone.

Scroll back through the last month of WhatsApp chats on the business number, and write down every question a customer asked, in their words, before any answer. Do the same with the person who answers the phone. Then group them. Fifty messages asking “how much” in different ways are one question.

Two things usually surprise people at this stage. The first is how many questions are about logistics rather than the product: parking, delivery areas, whether you take KNET on delivery. The second is how many arrive in a language the owner did not expect, from English and Arabic to Hindi, Urdu, Tagalog and Malayalam. That second point is why the assistant must answer in the language the customer writes in, and why your answers should be written as facts rather than as polished marketing copy that only reads well in one language.

How to write an answer the assistant can use

An answer written for a human colleague relies on context the assistant does not have. Each of the thirty should stand on its own and follow the same shape.

Part	What it contains	Example
The fact	The answer, with the real figure	Delivery inside Kuwait City is KD 1.500
The limit	Where the fact stops being true	Areas outside the city are quoted by a person
The next step	What the customer should do now	Send your area and we confirm the time
The hand-over	When to pass it to a person	Any complaint about a late order goes to a human

The limit is the part people leave out, and it is the part that prevents most bad answers. An assistant told only that delivery costs KD 1.500 will quote KD 1.500 to Jahra. An assistant told where the figure stops being true will ask a person instead.

Write figures exactly as you would quote them, including the currency and the three decimal places for fils. Vague answers (“reasonable prices”, “fast delivery”) give the model room to fill the gap, and what it fills it with will sound confident and may be wrong.

The answers that must never be improvised

Some questions carry a cost when the answer is wrong. For these, the assistant should only ever give the approved wording, or hand over.

• Prices and discounts. A quoted price is a promise the customer will screenshot.
• Refunds, returns and warranty. Exactly what you offer, with the time limit.
• Medical, legal or safety questions for clinics, pharmacies, pest control and similar businesses. The assistant books the appointment; it does not advise.
• Anything about a specific order or payment. Without a connection to your system it cannot see the order, so it must not guess its status.

This is also where the assistant is most exposed to people trying to talk it into a different answer, the problem we covered in prompt injection. Fixed wording for the sensitive answers is the simplest defence.

The hand-over rule is part of the list

The thirty answers decide what the assistant says. The hand-over rule decides when it stops talking. Treat it as the thirty-first answer and write it with the same care.

A workable rule has three triggers: the customer asks for a person, the question is outside the list, or the customer is unhappy. When any of them fires, the assistant says a person will reply, gives the time they can expect it, and passes the conversation on with the history intact so nobody asks the customer to repeat themselves.

This is not only good service. WhatsApp’s own business messaging policy requires businesses that automate conversations to offer prompt, clear and direct escalation paths, such as a transfer to a human agent. We wrote about the other side of this, when an assistant hands over too often, in why your Arabic assistant hands over.

A worked example

Take an illustrative case: a two-branch dental clinic whose receptionist answers WhatsApp between patients. A month of chats, grouped, gives about twenty-five distinct questions. Most are about booking, hours on Friday and Saturday, whether a particular doctor is in, prices for cleaning and whitening, insurance, and parking at each branch.

The clinic writes the answers in its own words with the real prices, marks the whitening price as “from consultation” because it depends on the patient, and sets three hand-overs: any mention of pain or swelling, any insurance question beyond the list of accepted providers, and any request for a specific appointment time, which the receptionist confirms.

What the assistant then handles alone is the repetitive part: hours, locations, prices, which doctor works which day. The receptionist keeps the parts that need judgement. Nothing about that requires more than thirty answers, and adding a hundred more would not have changed which conversations reach a person.

Test before customers do

Before switching it on, ask each of the thirty questions in at least three ways: formally, casually and in a second language. Then ask ten questions that are not on the list and check that every one is handed over rather than answered. The method is the one described in the 100-example test, scaled down to fit a small business.

Keep the list in one document with a date on it, and give one person the job of updating it when a price or an hour changes. An assistant is only as current as that document.

What it costs to run

The running cost is mostly the service fee, not the messages. Under Meta’s WhatsApp pricing, replies sent within 24 hours of the customer’s last message are free, and that covers nearly everything a customer-service assistant sends. We broke down the full yearly cost in what a WhatsApp AI assistant really costs.

How we set it up

Tothiq Assistant starts with exactly this exercise. The Starter package is built around up to thirty questions and one price list, and the first week is spent finding the real questions in your chats rather than guessing them. It answers in whatever language your customer writes in, and hands over to you on the rules you set. Send us the question your customers ask most and we will show you how the assistant would answer it.

Frequently asked questions

What if my business gets far more than thirty kinds of question?

Start with the thirty that come up most and hand the rest to a person. After a month, the hand-over log shows which questions are worth adding, based on how often they actually arrive.

Do I need to write the answers in every language?

No. Write them once, clearly, in the language you are most precise in. The assistant replies in the customer’s language. What matters is that the facts, figures and limits are exact.

How often should the answers be updated?

Whenever a price, an hour or a policy changes, on the same day. A monthly review of the hand-over log catches the rest.

Can the assistant check an order or a booking?

Only if it is connected to the system that holds them. Without that connection it should say a person will check and hand over, never guess.

Will customers mind talking to an assistant?

Most mind waiting more than they mind an assistant. What they do mind is a wrong answer or no way to reach a person, and the list and the hand-over rule exist to prevent both.