WhatsApp for business in Lebanon

Nobody emails a clinic to ask if they take walk ins. They message. Nobody fills in a form to ask the price of a service, they send a message and expect an answer in minutes.

So the website is not where your customer service happens. It is the thing that makes somebody comfortable enough to open WhatsApp, which is why a button that opens a chat with your business is worth more than any contact form you will ever build.

The awkward consequence is that your most important business system is an app on somebody's personal phone, usually the owner's, and it goes home with them every night.

Voice notes. A lot of customers would rather record ten seconds than type a sentence, particularly older ones. Any plan that assumes typed text has already lost part of the inbox.

M3arrab, which is Arabic written in Latin letters because it is faster on a phone. It has no fixed spelling, so the same question arrives spelled a different way by every person who asks it.

Price lists as images. Half the businesses here answer what do you charge by sending a photograph of a printed sheet, which works fine for the customer and means the prices exist nowhere searchable.

And the expectation of an answer now. Not within one working day. Now, including at 10pm, because the person messaging you is comparing you against whoever replies first.

The business number lives on one person's phone, in the consumer app, with no record of anything. Then that person leaves, or loses the phone, or goes on holiday, and years of customer history and the number itself go with them.

This is the single most common structural problem we see and it has nothing to do with AI. Get the number registered to the company. Get the conversations somewhere that is not one handset. Do that before you automate anything, because automating a system built on somebody's personal phone just makes the dependency worse.

There are two products with confusingly similar names. The WhatsApp Business app is free, runs on a phone, and is worked by hand. The WhatsApp Business Platform is what software connects to, and it is paid per message.

You do not need the platform to run a good business. Plenty do very well on the free app and a person who is quick. You need it the moment you want software answering, or you want the number to stop being tied to a device, or you have more conversations than a person can hold.

The honest test is whether anybody is answering the same question for the tenth time today. If they are, that is the point where software is cheaper than a person, and not really before.

Put your prices somewhere in text rather than only in a photograph. Fill in your business profile properly, address, hours, a photograph that matches your sign. Write down the six questions you answer most, because that list is the whole specification for anything you automate later.

None of that costs money and all of it makes whatever you do next cheaper.