Dispatch
Notes from running other people's messages
What we have learned building and operating WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram messaging for businesses: the error codes, the limits with their real numbers, and the failures that only show up in production. Every article here has to contain something that cost somebody an afternoon to find out.
Cutting first reply time without hiring anyone
Where the minutes actually go in a customer messaging queue, and the four changes that shorten first reply time without adding people.
What is different about running WhatsApp support where WhatsApp is the internet
Data costs, voice notes, mixed languages, M-Pesa screenshots and shared phones - the assumptions that break when WhatsApp is the primary channel.
Messages stopped sending: a diagnostic order of operations
Work from the outside in: the number, the session, the recipient, the window, the payload. The order that finds the cause fastest.
Field teams and beneficiaries: messaging where the connection is bad
Low bandwidth, shared handsets, and data about vulnerable people. The constraints that change how the channel should be used.
Small appointment businesses: one phone, three hundred clients
The owner's phone is the booking system, the diary and the marketing list. What to fix first when that stops working.
Lending over messaging: repayment reminders that do not harass
Reminders work and collections messaging is regulated in most places. The line, and what to record when somebody says they cannot pay.
Courier messaging: the driver, the customer and the record
Drivers already message customers from their own phones. What that costs, and what to put in its place without slowing anybody down.
Property enquiries: the same eight questions, forty times a day
High volume, low intent, and a viewing to book. What to answer automatically and how to tell a serious enquiry apart.
School messaging: the parent group is not the answer
Why parent groups go wrong, what a school actually needs to send, and the safeguarding line around staff phones.
Restaurant messaging: bookings, and the thirty minutes before service
Confirmations cut no-shows, and the busiest hour is when nobody can answer. What to automate and what to refuse.
Messaging in a clinic: the appointment is the easy part
Reminders and repeat prescriptions work well. Everything involving a symptom does not, and the line has to be drawn in advance.
Conversations you should not be having, and how to notice
Health details, children, distress and financial hardship arrive in ordinary inboxes. What to record, what not to, and when to stop.
The five things that actually protect a business messaging account
Two-step verification, two admins, a leaver routine, scoped keys and somewhere the SIM lives. Everything else is secondary.
Sentences that create obligations you did not mean to make
A chat message is a written record. The five phrases that become commitments, and how to say the same thing safely.
Articles 1 to 14 of 98. New ones are announced on WhatsApp, or take the feed.