Most of the messages a studio gets are the same six questions. Is there space on Thursday at 7. How much is the 10-class pass. Can I freeze my membership. What time does the 6.30 finish. Do you do beginners. Can I cancel tomorrow's. They arrive on WhatsApp and in Instagram DMs, and about a third of them land after 9pm.
Count them for a week. For a studio with two rooms it comes to something like 90 messages, and 70 of them could be answered by looking at the timetable or the price list. The owner answers them from the sofa and from the car park between classes, and still loses some, because an unread Instagram DM from Tuesday is gone by Thursday.
The fix is a reply layer that sits on the WhatsApp Business number and the Instagram inbox. It reads the live timetable from Mindbody or Fresha, whichever the business already uses, and the price list from a Google Sheet the owner controls. When a message comes in it works out whether it is one of the standard questions. If it is, it answers in the studio's own words, with the actual number of spaces left on Thursday, and offers the booking link. If it is anything else, a complaint or a medical question, it stays unanswered and the owner gets a nudge with a one-line summary.
Cancellations go the same way. If the person is inside the cancellation window the system cancels it in the booking tool and says so. If they are outside it, it says what the policy is, politely, and leaves the decision to a human.
Nothing is sent that the owner has not seen the wording of. The first two weeks run in draft mode, where every reply is written but held, and she approves or edits each one from her phone. After that she lets the plain ones go out on their own and keeps the holds for anything with money in it.
This is the kind of thing we build. It runs in your own WhatsApp and Instagram accounts and your own booking system. The messages from after 9pm get answered at 9.02.