To automate WhatsApp Business you need three things: a WhatsApp Business number on Meta's Cloud API, an agent that actually knows your business, and a place where the conversations land so a person can step in. On SuperCognit that is one afternoon of work and no code — import your website, connect the number from the dashboard, publish. This guide walks through it in order, then covers what to automate first, what to keep human, and how the economics changed now that Meta charges for every reply.
What "automation" should mean on WhatsApp
Most WhatsApp automation is a keyword menu: press 1 for opening hours, press 2 for prices. Customers do not write like that. They write full sentences, in their own language, at eleven at night, and they expect the answer a good employee would give. Automation worth having looks like this:
- An instant first reply that answers the actual question, grounded in your website and documents and citing the page it came from.
- Follow-up questions that qualify — dates, party size, budget, what the customer needs — asked in conversation, not as a form.
- A clean handoff: when the agent cannot help, the thread is in your inbox with the whole context, not a lost message.
- Lead capture with consent, so a warm enquiry becomes a contact in your CRM while the customer is still typing.
- Payment links in the thread where a deposit or an order is the natural next step.
Before you start: three prerequisites
- A WhatsApp Business number on the Cloud API. That means a Meta business portfolio and a number that is not currently registered in the consumer or small-business WhatsApp app — a number can only live in one place.
- A website that is roughly current. It becomes the agent's knowledge, so the rate sheet on your site is the rate sheet the agent quotes. Fix the obviously stale pages first; the sync will keep them current afterwards.
- A decision about who watches the inbox. Automation handles the volume; someone still owns the exceptions.
The setup, step by step
Build the agent from your website
Point SuperCognit at your domain. Pages are crawled into a cited knowledge base and a first agent is drafted in about two minutes. Upload the documents the site does not carry — price lists, policies, the FAQ that lives in someone's sent folder.
Set the tone and the rules
Write the welcome message, tell the agent what it must never do (quote discounts it cannot cite, give medical or legal advice, promise stock it has not checked), and add the one-line disclosure that it is an AI — the EU AI Act requires it at the start of the conversation. Language is automatic: the agent replies in whatever language the customer writes, across 12 and more.
Connect the number
In the dashboard, open the agent's channels and add WhatsApp. Where Meta's sign-in popup is available you authorise the number in a few clicks; otherwise paste the Cloud API details from your Meta app — phone number ID, a permanent access token and the app secret, all stored encrypted. The dashboard then shows the callback URL and verify token to paste into the Meta app's WhatsApp configuration, and you subscribe to the messages field. No code at any point.
Send yourself the first twenty messages
Ask the questions your customers really ask, in the way they ask them, including the badly spelled ones. Read the answers and the citations. Every wrong or missing answer is a page to fix or a document to upload — this half hour is where the quality comes from.
Turn on lead capture and handoff
Tell the agent, in plain language, what makes an enquiry worth a human: the use case, the dates, the size of the order. Connect Pipedrive or HubSpot with one click, or let leads land in the platform inbox with a webhook to wherever you want them. Consent is asked before contact details are stored.
Go live and set the sync
Publish. Then set the re-sync cadence per source: hourly for the pages that change (availability, menus, prices), weekly for the rest. From here the agent tracks your site without a ticket.
What to automate first, and what to keep human
The economics from 1 October 2026
From 1 October 2026, Meta charges for service messages — the free-form replies inside the 24-hour customer window that were free until then. An automated conversation that exchanges twenty messages is twenty billed messages. Three habits keep the bill sane: make each answer complete so the thread is short; move volume to channels you own — the widget on your site and Telegram carry no per-message fee — and keep WhatsApp for the customers who prefer it; and use daily spend caps and session limits so a runaway thread cannot surprise you. The point is not to leave WhatsApp. It is to stop it being the only door.
Compliance, in two lines
Say it is an AI in the first message, in the customer's language. Ask before you store contact details, and keep the transcripts — they are your record of what was said, to whom, and when. Both come out of the box; both are still your responsibility.
If you run WhatsApp for clients
Agencies run the same playbook per client with one structural rule: one workspace per client, so knowledge, numbers, credentials and conversations never mix. Your team works across every client workspace from one login under a partner arrangement, the client keeps ownership, and you bill it as a retainer or per seat. Build the first client's agent before the pitch; the WhatsApp demo on their own number is what closes it.
What you should have by the end of the afternoon
A number that answers in seconds, in the customer's language, from your own content, with every thread visible to your team and every warm enquiry in your CRM. Plans are priced in EUR with a 7-day trial — long enough to connect the number, send yourself the twenty messages, and see whether the answers are good enough to leave running overnight.