Automation for · WhatsApp

Automation for work that arrives on WhatsApp.

A client sends a document to WhatsApp. Somebody opens it, works out which account it belongs to, saves it somewhere, and updates whatever tracks the job. Nothing about that is hard, and it happens every day, and it is where things get lost.

WhatsApp is where a lot of real work now starts. It is also the channel with no inbox, no assignment and no record of what was done, which is why it is usually the first thing to fall over as a business grows.

What this usually looks like

The channel behaves like a system.

TYPICAL BUILD04 BEHAVIOURS
  • 01 Messages and attachments captured, sender matched to the client record BUILT
  • 02 Documents filed to the right folder and attached to the right card BUILT
  • 03 An acknowledgement sent back, so the client knows it arrived BUILT
  • 04 Anything unclear routed to a person instead of being guessed at BUILT

What happens when it breaks

The same document, arriving twice.

The same document often arrives twice, once by WhatsApp and once by email, and a system that files both has quietly created two of everything. Deduplication against a shared registry is not an optimisation here; it is the difference between a record and a mess.

And when the pipe stops, something has to notice. I have had my own message bridge sit dead for two days behind a monitor that had stopped reporting, so I ask about that before I ask about anything else.

The write-up of that outage

A professional services firm runs exactly this, alongside email intake, across every service line. Read the case

Automation & Integration Engineering, in full

The channel with no inbox

What arrives on WhatsApp and then stops?

Tell me what happens to a message after it lands, and what gets lost when nobody is looking. I will tell you what I would look at first.

Message Dan on WhatsApp (opens in a new tab)

or email dan@burdetsky.xyz

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