An AI WhatsApp Chatbot That Knows the Customer Before It Replies

A customer writes at 22:14: "Hi, what does a consultation cost, and is there anything free Thursday afternoon?" Most chatbots would answer that question as if a stranger had asked it. Elly, Convelly's AI, answers it the way your business would: it already knows this is Lena, that she has had two bookings, that a colleague noted she prefers late afternoons, and that Thursday at 16:30 with Sara is free. So it names the price, offers the slot, and books it when she says yes. This page explains what Elly knows before it types, what it is allowed to do in a WhatsApp, Instagram or email conversation, and how you stay in control.

Not a script, and not a generic assistant

There are two common kinds of chatbot. The first follows a decision tree: press 1 for opening hours, press 2 for prices. The second is a general AI that writes fluent answers but knows nothing about your business or the person asking. Elly is neither. It answers as your business, with your services, prices, rules and real calendar, and it answers a specific customer whose history it has just read. If you want a broader view of what good AI customer service on WhatsApp looks like in practice, that guide covers the ground. This page is about how Convelly does it.

What it knows about the customer before it types

Before every reply, Elly looks at that customer's real situation in Convelly:

• Who they are: name, phone number and email.
• Their bookings: the next appointments and the recent ones, each with the service, the staff member, the price and the status. It also knows whether each visit is paid, how it was paid, whether a deposit is still open, and whether anything was refunded.
• Their payments: recent payment links and whether they were paid.
• Your team's private notes about them. The AI uses them, but it will never reveal or hint that they exist.
• The whole conversation so far, including voice notes written out automatically, buttons they tapped, messages your team sent, and messages that failed to arrive.
• Where they are in your sales process: their open deals, which stage each one is in, and any extra details you keep on the customer.

So when a regular writes "can I come Thursday?", Elly is not answering a stranger. It knows she had a colour treatment with Sara last month, that the deposit for her next visit is still unpaid, and that a colleague noted "prefers late afternoon". Its answer reflects all of that. And if the same person writes on Instagram tomorrow, or emails you from an address already on their record, Convelly knows it is the same customer, so Elly works from the same record and the same knowledge.

What it knows about your business

Elly answers as your business, not under its own name and not as a general assistant. Three short texts describe who you are, what the AI must and must not do, and how it should sound. You do not write them from scratch: during setup Convelly reads your website and writes them for you, shaped by a few choices such as "friendly", "keep replies short", "never quote prices" or "hand over to a person if the customer is upset". You can edit them at any time and go back to an earlier version. The guide on writing system rules and a style guide for your AI shows what belongs in each of the three texts.

On top of those texts, the AI works from your real data. It knows your services with their durations and prices, and it reads your live calendar, so it never offers a time that is not free. Upload your price list, policies, FAQs or treatment guides and it looks things up in them when a question comes up. Building a knowledge base your AI can actually use explains how to prepare those documents. It also has your approved WhatsApp messages for the moments when free text is not allowed, and, only if you allow it, the web for questions your documents do not cover. Answering from your own documents instead of general knowledge is the practical side of stopping an AI from inventing answers. The whole approach is laid out in the guide on teaching an AI to sound like your business.

What it does in the chat

Knowing things is only useful if Elly can act on them. In a WhatsApp or Instagram conversation it can:

• Reply in whatever language the customer writes in.
• Book, move and cancel appointments, start to finish. These are real bookings, exactly like the ones from your booking page: it checks live availability, holds the slot, asks for a deposit if the service requires one, and waits for your confirmation if you want to approve bookings first. It can book a series of sessions in one go.
• Ask for missing details, such as an email address or a preferred staff member, and save them to the customer's record.
• Open a deal or move it to the next stage when the conversation calls for it.
• Send an approved message when WhatsApp's 24-hour window has closed, so the reply still arrives.
• Hand over to a person: switch itself off for that conversation and pass it to a named team member, for example when a customer is upset or asks for something outside its rules.
• Wait a moment when a customer sends several short messages in a row, and answer the whole thought at once instead of replying to each fragment.

The handover deserves a closer look, because it is where most chatbots fail. The AI does not keep going until someone notices. It follows the rules you set about when to stop, switches itself off for that conversation and passes it to a named colleague, who sees the full thread with everything the customer has said. When the AI should stop and fetch a human goes through the situations worth writing into your rules. On email Elly is more careful, because anyone can put a customer's name on an email: it answers questions and books new appointments, and hands requests to move or cancel a booking to your team. It never answers newsletters or automatic replies, and it stops after a few automatic emails in one conversation a day.

You stay in control

Every conversation has one switch. Turn the AI off and a person takes over. Turn it on and the AI continues. The AI does not pause by itself when a colleague starts typing, so the switch is the deliberate way to take over, and it is always one click away in the team inbox. You also decide per channel whether new conversations start with the AI on or off, and you can switch the AI off for the whole business with one master switch.

Beyond on and off, you choose what the AI may touch: customers, deals, bookings, documents, the web. Each service has its own "the AI may book this" switch, so a consultation can be bookable by the AI while a complex treatment still goes through your team. The first AI-written message in a conversation can carry a short "this reply is automated" line, in your wording, per channel. Messages written by your team are never labelled. Convelly keeps a record of every AI reply and what it looked at before writing it. And if the AI cannot work, for example because an AI account has run out of credit, it pauses, admins are told in the app and by email, and messages keep arriving for your team to answer.

“

Customers expect replies within an hour. We can't hire for that. The AI can.

— Owner, Studio Erfolg

How the studio uses the AI day to day is in the Studio Erfolg case study.

Powered by Convelly's credits, or your own AI account

Nothing needs to be set up or bought elsewhere. Your business gets a wallet of AI credits, and one credit is roughly one customer reply. Your plan refills the wallet every month, and you can buy extra packs that never expire. If the wallet runs empty, the AI pauses and your team keeps answering. No message is lost. Plans and included credits are on the pricing page.

If you already pay OpenAI, Anthropic or Google for an AI account, you can plug that in instead, and Convelly does not count your usage at all. What bringing your own API key really means explains the trade-offs, and the guide on which AI model should answer your customers compares the options.

Elly also helps your team write

Elly is not only for the conversations you hand to it. When a person is replying, the same knowledge is a helping hand in the message box:

• Write a reply from the conversation and the customer's history, then edit it before sending.
• Improve a draft: shorten, lengthen, fix grammar, make it more professional, friendlier or warmer, add emojis, or give your own instruction.
• Translate into eight languages.
• Summarise a long conversation in a few lines before you take it over.
• Voice notes are written out automatically, so nobody has to listen to a two-minute audio to know what was asked, and you can search inside them.
• Quick replies with your standard answers and an attachment, for any channel.
• Take payments in the chat: pick a product and drop a payment link into the conversation.

And when the customer goes quiet

Answering well is half the job. The other half is what happens when a customer asks for a price, writes "I'll get back to you", and never does. That is what an AI follow-up is for: a short series of messages Elly writes for that one person, towards one goal you describe in a sentence, stopping the moment they reply. Because it is the same Elly with the same knowledge, the follow-up picks up exactly where the conversation left off.