Resources · 2 min read
What to check before putting a WhatsApp agent in front of customers
The short list that separates a bot that helps from one that burns customers — useful even if you build it with another provider.
1 · Where does the truth come from?
Every agent answers from some source. If it's a PDF someone exported a month ago, your bot is selling last month's business. Before going live: is the source the live system? Who updates it and how often? What happens the day the catalog changes and the source doesn't? If the answer is “someone updates it by hand”, you already know where it will break.
2 · What does it do when it doesn't know?
The question that separates a serious agent from a toy. The honest options are two: ask the customer to narrow down, or escalate to a person with full context. The default option of an unguarded model is the third: improvise. Ask to see the written list of cases where the agent does NOT answer — if it doesn't exist, the agent answers everything, including what it doesn't know.
3 · Who answers for it and how does it escalate?
An angry customer, a return request, a medical or legal question: there are conversations an agent must not close. Define the escalation threshold before the first real message, and the channel through which a person receives the case — with the full history, not a “someone forwarded you a query”. And in hours: who reviews escalations on a Sunday?
4 · What will you look at in week one?
Three numbers are enough to start: how many conversations it handled, what share it escalated, and how many answers your team corrected. The first measures adoption, the second measures real coverage, the third measures truth. If your provider can't give you all three, you don't have a system in production: you have a demo with access to customers.
Rather go through it on your own case?
A 15-minute audit of your real operation. You leave with an honest read on what to automate first, and what to leave alone.
Book a 15-min audit