Customer messages don’t arrive during office hours. They arrive when someone finishes work, when they’ve put the kids to bed, when they finally remember the tooth that’s been aching since Tuesday. Which is to say, mostly after six in the evening.
In clinics, studies of inbound calls put roughly 45% of them outside business hours, and with WhatsApp the share is probably higher because messaging at eleven at night doesn’t feel intrusive: the message just waits.
The problem is that the customer doesn’t wait. They write to three places and go with whoever answers first, even if that first reply comes at seven in the morning and the others at ten. There are four ways to cover those hours, and none is obviously better: it depends on your volume and how far you’re willing to go.
Hire shifts
The complete solution and the most expensive one: an actual person covering evenings, weekends, or both. It works when your after-hours enquiries are complex and need judgement, or when your ticket is high enough that a single recovered sale pays for several hours of coverage.
It fails on the arithmetic. If you get fifteen messages after six, you’re paying someone for eight hours to handle fifteen conversations that add up to under an hour of real work, and the rest of the time that person is waiting.
WhatsApp Business away messages
The free app includes away messages: you set the text and it goes out when someone writes outside your hours. It beats silence and takes ten minutes to configure, so if you have nothing right now, set it up today.
But let’s be honest about what it solves. It announces that you’re not there, it doesn’t handle anything. “Thanks for writing, we’ll get back to you during business hours” confirms to the customer that nothing will be resolved tonight, which gives them explicit permission to go message someone else. It’s a floor, not a strategy.
A menu of options
The next step most businesses try: a reply tree where the customer presses 1 to book, 2 for pricing, 3 for the address. It covers the most frequent questions with nobody available, and for fixed information — address, hours, payment methods — it works reasonably well.
Where it breaks is anything that requires looking something up. The menu doesn’t know whether Thursday is free because it isn’t connected to the calendar, so the “book an appointment” option ends with “please contact us during business hours,” which is where we started. And there’s a hidden cost: a customer who’s been through two menus and still has no answer is more annoyed than one who got nothing at all.
An agent connected to your systems
The difference from a menu isn’t that it answers better — it’s that it can look things up and act. It reads your real calendar, offers times that actually exist, blocks the slot and sends the confirmation, at eleven at night with nobody awake. When an enquiry falls outside its scope — a clinical question, a complaint, a negotiation — it doesn’t improvise: it flags the conversation and hands it to a person first thing in the morning, with the full chat so nobody has to repeat anything.
This makes sense when after-hours volume is steady, the questions repeat, and a meaningful share of those messages are buying intent rather than idle enquiries. It doesn’t if you get three after-hours messages a week, because a well-written away message covers that and the difference doesn’t justify the setup.
How to decide
Measure one thing for two weeks: how many messages arrive outside your hours, and how many of those were someone trying to buy.
Under five a week, set up the away message and get on with your life. Between five and twenty, a well-built menu with quick replies covers most of it. Above twenty, especially if they’re buying intent, you’re losing money every night and it’s worth solving properly.
One detail that changes more than you’d expect: if you’re going to leave an automated message, don’t write “we’ll get back to you soon” — write when. “We’ll reply before 9am tomorrow” is a checkable promise, and a customer who knows when their answer is coming has fewer reasons to message someone else in the meantime. It’s free, and almost nobody does it.
At Katalis we build AI agents that reply and book through WhatsApp at any hour. If you’d like to work out how many messages you’re losing at night, get in touch.