In this article
A bot can be attached to your own account and left to answer the chats you are not reading. It replies in your conversation, under your name, to people who wrote to you — and stands aside the moment you start typing yourself.
Genuinely useful, and the only feature in the app where something else speaks as you. That deserves one decision made deliberately.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Have incoming chats answered while you are away.
- check_circle Decide whether it speaks as you or as itself.
- check_circle Limit which conversations it touches.
- check_circle Take over cleanly when you arrive.
The reply lands in the ordinary conversation, which is what makes the arrangement work and what makes it worth thinking about.
smart_toy Somebody wrote to a person
That is the fact the whole page turns on. A message to a shop's account is addressed to a shop; a message to your account is addressed to you, and whatever answers it is answering on your behalf in a conversation the other person believes is with you.
Most of the time nothing is at stake and a fast, accurate reply is better than four hours of silence. The question is what happens in the cases where it matters — where the sender takes the reply as your answer, acts on it, and finds out later that you had not read the message at all.
The whole of good practice here is removing that gap. Not by making the bot smarter, but by making it obvious what it is and by making the handover to a person a stated part of the exchange rather than something the sender waits for without knowing whether it is coming.
An assistant that says so, or one that does not
Same bot, same replies, two quite different relationships with the person writing to you.
fact_check Announced
person_off Unannounced
Say it is automatic in the first line. Everything difficult about this is downstream of not saying it.
filter_alt Choose which conversations it touches
The setting worth spending time on is scope. A bot answering everybody includes your family, the person organising Saturday, and the friend who sent one line at midnight — and every one of those gets a business reply from somebody they know.
Excluding your contacts is the single change that makes this arrangement sensible for an account that is both personal and professional. New people get handled, everybody who already knows you gets your silence, which is a normal thing between people and requires no explanation.
The stronger version of the same idea is separation: if enough of your messages are commercial, the right structure is a second account or a channel with its own contact route, so that none of this has to sit on the account your friends write to.
schedule What it should actually say
Three things and no more. That this is automatic, when a person will read it, and one piece of information that saves a round trip — the thing you always have to ask for, or the answer to the question that arrives most often.
What it should avoid is the appearance of having understood. A reply that summarises the sender's message back at them, or promises to have logged it somewhere, is doing work that creates expectations rather than meeting them. Acknowledging is enough; the value is entirely in the stated time.
settings Setting it up
- Connect the bot from your business settings It answers in your chats.
- Exclude your contacts Friends should get your silence.
- Say it is automatic in the first line The whole of good practice.
- State when a person will read it That is the useful part.
- Keep it short and non-committal Anything it says binds you.
- Answer by hand to take over And switch it off when you return.
This page lets something answer for you. The curriculum step is the structure around that at scale: routing enquiries, keeping a thread per person, and how a conversation gets handed from a machine to somebody who can actually help.
At a glance
- 1Auto-reply bot
A bot answers your chats while you are away.
- 2Say it's automatic
Make clear when a person will reply.
- 3Exclude contacts
Keep friends out of automatic replies.
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