The cost of slow WhatsApp replies
A Belgium-based fashion e-commerce store was receiving 600+ WhatsApp messages every week. Order status checks, sizing questions, return requests, and questions about restocks. The customer experience team was two people. By the time the third message came in each morning, the median response time had crossed two hours.
Late-night messages stayed unanswered until morning. Customers who didn't get a fast reply moved on, to competitors that did. The team knew exactly which sales they were losing, because shoppers told them: "I already bought from X."
A WhatsApp assistant grounded in Shopify
We connected a WhatsApp Business API number to a GenAITech assistant trained on the store's product catalog and live order data from Shopify. The assistant handles three jobs end to end: order status (via carrier API), return triage (size exchanges are automatic, refunds escalate), and product recommendations.
Human handoff is built in. Any conversation showing frustration signals, repeated questions, capital letters, or the phrase "speak to a human," is escalated to the CX team with full context already in the thread.
The kicker: customers stayed inside WhatsApp. No portal, no support ticket, no email back-and-forth.
What changed in 30 days
Median response time fell from 4 hours 20 minutes to 8 seconds. The CX team's queue shrank to a handful of escalations per day, the cases that actually require human judgement.
Conversion on inbound WhatsApp chats lifted 18%. Most of that came from instant after-hours replies that previously sat overnight.