How Can a Business in Spain Run Customer Service on WhatsApp with AI?

Short answer: connect the WhatsApp Business API to an AI agent, write your first-contact messages as approved templates, let the agent answer customer questions in Spanish and English, and give your team a shared inbox to take over. Keep service replies and marketing separate: Spanish law (article 21 of Ley 34/2002, the LSSI-CE) forbids advertising by electronic means the person has not asked for or authorised, with a narrow exception for your own customers. The responsibility for consent is yours.

Why WhatsApp for customers in Spain?

Customers use it because it is where they already talk to friends: a quick message to rebook a dentist, ask a plumber's availability or confirm a table. For the business, a message is easier to answer in the gaps between jobs than a call, and a written thread is a record. The same agent can also answer your phone and website chat, with one memory of the customer across channels: records are linked by phone number, not merged, and the agent withholds what was said on another channel until the person verifies who they are.

What do I need to start?

1. A WhatsApp Business API connection for your number, inside our platform. Day-to-day work happens there; business verification and the payment card for Meta's charges are still set up in Meta's own tools. See WhatsApp Business API and running WhatsApp without WhatsApp Manager.
2. A knowledge base from your website, price list and FAQs.
3. Templates for messages you start: reminders, confirmations, follow-ups. Meta approves them; see how to get templates approved.
4. Handover rules: which messages go to a person, and who watches the inbox.

Meta charges per message under its published rates, and we add our fee; the pricing page has the plans.

Which languages does it reply in?

Chat and WhatsApp replies run in 37 languages. Spanish and English are among them, so the agent can answer a Spanish message in Spanish and an English message in English. Catalan, Basque and Galician are not among them: a customer who writes in Catalan will be answered in Spanish or English. (By phone, the voice agent speaks all three; see the languages post.) You can write templates in other languages yourself, subject to Meta's approval.

How does the shared inbox work?

Every conversation is in one inbox. Your team can see what the agent said and take over; while a person is typing, the agent stays quiet, and it can pick up again when you hand back. That is the right place for complaints, refunds, quotes and anything the agent is not meant to decide. Read more on the shared inbox page.

What are the consent rules for marketing messages?

As read in the BOE on 25 October 2026: article 21 of Ley 34/2002 forbids advertising or promotional messages by email or equivalent electronic communication unless the recipient requested or expressly authorised them. Paragraph 2 makes an exception where there is a prior contractual relationship, you lawfully obtained the contact details, and you use them only for your own products or services similar to the ones the customer contracted; you must offer a simple, free way to opt out when you collect the data and in every message. Article 20 requires commercial messages to be identifiable as such, with the sender identified. The GDPR applies on top. Whether your messages count as advertising is a question for your adviser. This is not legal advice.

In practice: a booking confirmation or a reply to the customer's question is service, not advertising. A "20% off this week" broadcast is advertising. Send broadcasts only to people who opted in, and honour a STOP at once. The posts on WhatsApp opt-in rules and opted-in broadcasts have the product side.

What should the agent never do on WhatsApp?

Four things. It should not promise a price, a date or a refund that is not in your material; it should not take payment details or documents in the chat unless you have decided how that is handled; it should not argue with an upset customer, so route complaints to a person; and it should not message anyone who has not written to you first, other than with an approved template to someone who agreed to hear from you. Write each of these into the agent's instructions, and read the first fifty conversations to see whether it keeps to them.

What does a first month look like?

• Week 1: connect the number, load the knowledge base, test with the staff.
• Week 2: go live for out-of-hours messages only.
• Week 3: add appointment reminders as templates.
• Week 4: read the unanswered questions, fix the knowledge base, widen the hours.

For the full picture in Spain, see the Spain page, the WhatsApp AI agent and the AI receptionist.