WhatsApp orders and questions, without someone glued to the phone

Imagine a small café and grill in Al Karama at one o'clock. There is a queue at the counter, six tickets in the kitchen, and the shop's WhatsApp keeps buzzing on the shelf behind the till. "Do you have chicken biryani today?" "Do you deliver to Al Mankhool?" "2 karak, 1 zaatar manakeesh, pickup in 15 minutes." Whoever is free answers, a few minutes late, between two customers. Some messages never get a reply, and that customer orders somewhere else.

The answers are not hard. They are in your menu, your prices, your stock and your hours. What is missing is someone to look them up every few minutes.

What the Front Desk does

The AI Front Desk answers your shop's own WhatsApp Business number. Before it says anything, it checks your CreekPOS shop with the shop's own tools: the catalogue and today's prices, what is sold out, your opening hours, your delivery areas with their fee and minimum order, and the answers you wrote to your common questions. It never invents a price, a dish or a time. When it does not know, it asks the customer or hands the chat to your team.

It replies in the customer's language: Gulf Arabic, English, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Bengali, Arabic typed in Latin letters or Hinglish, often all in the same afternoon. "Are you open?" or "where are you?" gets your hours or your address and map link straight away. A customer who sends "hi", then "I want", then "2 burgers" in three quick messages gets one answer, not three.

In Settings → Front desk you give the assistant a name, a tone (friendly, formal or brief) and a welcome line, and you add your own questions and answers: "Do you have parking?", "Is the biryani spicy?"

From a chat to an order on the till

When the customer wants to order, the Front Desk builds the order from your catalogue, with the sizes and add-ons they asked for, and prices it exactly as your online shop does, with VAT and the delivery fee for their area. Then it reads the quote back, the lines, the total, pickup or delivery, and asks whether to place it.

Only the customer's yes, or a tap on the Confirm button, places the order. The AI can never confirm anything by itself. At that moment the order is priced again: if a price changed or something sold out in the meantime, the customer gets a new quote and the question again.

The order then goes through your online shop's own checkout, pickup or delivery with cash on delivery, and reaches the till and the kitchen like any other online order. An order sent after closing time is scheduled for your opening. The customer gets the order number and the total on WhatsApp, and later its status: accepted, out for delivery, delivered.

When a person should answer

The Front Desk hands the conversation to your team when the customer asks for a person, when there is a complaint, when it lacks the knowledge to answer, or when the day's AI replies are used up. The customer gets one polite line saying a member of the team will answer here, and the assistant stays quiet.

Your team sees these chats first in the Front desk inbox, with the pictures and the voice-note transcripts. They can Take over, reply, Assign the chat to a colleague, or Return to the assistant when they are done. If a handed-off customer waits more than 15 minutes (you choose the minutes), you get an owner alert.

Start in Draft or Pilot

You decide who answers, per channel:

• Off: nothing answers, but messages still reach the inbox.
• Draft: the assistant writes each reply; your team reads it and sends it.
• Pilot: automatic only for the numbers on your list, drafts for everyone else.
• Automatic: the assistant answers every customer.

A sensible start: a week in Draft, then Pilot with your own and your staff's phones, then Automatic.

Good to know

• You need your own WhatsApp Business account on Meta's WhatsApp Cloud API, connected in Settings → Front desk. Orders need your online shop switched on.
• WhatsApp's rule: free replies only within 24 hours of the customer's last message. Outside that window, only an approved order-status message can go out.
• AI replies have a daily cap: 200 on Restaurant, 600 on Chain, 30 in the trial. After it, conversations go to your team.
• Card numbers and passwords are masked before anything is stored or sent. Messages and pictures are kept 90 days. A customer who writes "stop" gets nothing more until they write "start".
• Messages go through Meta (WhatsApp) and to the AI provider named in the privacy policy; they are not used for training under the API terms.

What it does not do

It does not take payments: orders are cash on delivery. It does not send promotions or broadcasts. It does not answer anything outside your shop's business, and it never promises what your own rules do not allow.

The AI Front Desk is an add-on of the Online Restaurant and Chain plans (coming soon); it costs AED 99 a month before VAT. Read the AI Front Desk page and the manual chapter.