Too many WhatsApp enquiries after office hours? Let an AI agent reply for you.

A customer who asks "how much?" at 10 pm is usually asking several businesses at once. The first one to answer properly has the best chance of getting the sale.

People expect that speed. In HubSpot's research, 82% of people rated an immediate response as important or very important when they had a marketing or sales question, and 90% when they had a customer service question. HubSpot defines "immediate" as 10 minutes or less.

After hours, few businesses get near that. In the same Mampu AI sample, when a conversation started after hours, customers waited a median of 13 minutes for a person, and 44.5% waited more than an hour. By the time someone replies the next morning, many have bought elsewhere or simply stopped replying. Our guide on why WhatsApp leads go cold shows how to read those silent chats and what to fix first.

There is also a cost on the team side. Staff who answer from their phone at midnight burn out, and the morning starts with a pile of chats that all need reading before anyone can reply.

The general fix is the same whichever tool you choose. A good after-hours reply should:

• Reply at once, and be honest that the office is closed. The first message should answer or move the chat forward, and say when a person will be back, for example "Our team is back at 9 am, but I can help with prices and bookings now."
• Answer from your own information. Prices, packages, opening hours, branch addresses, delivery areas and policies should come from what your business wrote, never from the AI's general knowledge. When the answer isn't there, it should say a person will follow up rather than guess.
• Collect the details your team needs. Name, what they want, which branch or area, and a good time to call, gathered in a normal back-and-forth so the morning shift can act without asking again.
• Book a time or promise one. If your business takes appointments, offer real free slots. If it doesn't, tell the customer when your team will reply and keep that promise.
• Hand urgent chats to a person. Complaints, emergencies and anyone asking for a human should go straight to your team, with the full conversation attached.
• Keep follow-ups out of the night. A reminder to a customer who went quiet should wait for a sensible hour, not land at 2 am.

1. Set your real business hours, with the timezone. Everything else depends on the bot knowing when you are open. If you run several numbers or branches with different hours, set each one.
2. Write the after-hours greeting yourself. Say you are closed, say when the team is back, and offer what the bot can do now. Keep it to two or three short lines.
3. Give the AI your answers. Start with the 20 questions your team answers most, with today's prices. If you already have years of WhatsApp chats, our guide on building a chatbot from the chats you already have shows how to turn them into FAQs.
4. Choose the details to collect. Only what the morning shift needs to act, asked one at a time.
5. Set the handover rules and who receives them. Use the list above, and name the person or team.
6. Set quiet hours for follow-ups. No automated reminders late at night or early in the morning.
7. Reply the next morning within the 24-hour window. Under WhatsApp's policy, once 24 hours have passed since the customer's last message, a business can only send approved message templates. A chat left until the next afternoon may be past that point.
8. Test with your real after-hours messages. Send the short, misspelt, mixed-language messages your customers actually write, at a time outside your hours, and read every reply.