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Rules in place, tested with a real message
After this lesson, you'll have the routing rules and on-call schedules written down where the whole team can see them, tested with a real message that doesn't get picked up twice or fall through the cracks.
By Yodai · Published on September 6, 2026 · Updated on October 12, 2026
When several people handle your business's WhatsApp with a bot, you need to decide what the bot keeps for itself, who's responsible for each customer, what happens when two people are free at the same time, and what hours each person covers. Often all of that lives in someone's head and on some random note.
Nobody checks a random note the moment they need to reply. If the routing isn't written down somewhere the whole team looks at, exactly as you decided it, it doesn't exist yet.
And even if you write it down well, there's one question only a real message can answer: if someone writes in right now, who picks it up? One person, two, or nobody? This lesson is about writing it down and testing it, not assuming it came out right.
What to write down, and in what order
The order matters because whoever reads the sheet applies the first rule they find. If you put the schedule before the routing rules, the schedule wins when it shouldn't, and a customer who has an assigned person ends up with whoever's free that afternoon, even if their person is available an hour later.
- 1Assignment rules first
Start with who gets each client: by type of request, by whether they're an existing client or a new one, by who handled the last conversation. This overrides the schedule: if a client has an assigned owner, they belong to that person, whether or not that person is on duty at the moment. - 2Coverage schedules, next
On top of the routing rules goes who's available during each time slot. Write it as an on-call schedule, not a personal calendar: one person covers nine to two, another covers two to eight, the bot answers what it can over the weekend, and on Monday someone follows up on whatever's still pending, or whatever you've decided works for your business. - 3The order when two rules compete
If a customer has an assigned person but that person isn't on call, you need to decide which rule wins: does the customer wait for their person to come back, or does whoever's available pick it up? That priority gets written on the same sheet, not left for everyone to improvise when the message comes in. - 4A test message, not the first real one
Before an actual customer writes in, you send one yourself from another number. Follow the message step by step: what the bot answers, whether it hands the conversation off to a person, and who on the team picks it up: one person, two, or nobody.
Test it yourself or wait for the first client
- It costs nothing to set it up this way
- If it fails, a client waiting for a reply pays for it
- You find out about the mistake late, once someone's already upset
- You send the message from your phone or one you trust
- You see the whole path: what the bot answers, when it hands off to a person, who responds
- If there's a mistake, no client ever sees it
Which one to pick: Always test it yourself first. The only time you can skip it is if you already ran this exact test recently and haven't touched the rules or the schedule since.
The test message, and what's supposed to happen
Normally the bot answers right away and takes the booking, which stays pending until someone from the business confirms it: that's exactly what you wrote down on the list of things the bot doesn't let go of.
If instead you ask to speak with a person, the bot hands the conversation off to the business, and according to your sheet, it's picked up by whoever's on call that night, not the person who normally handles that customer during the week, because that person isn't available at that hour.
On a Sunday at nine at night, only one person should pick it up. If two answer, you've got a collision: a rule that's written wrong. If nobody answers, you've got a dropped ball: a gap in the on-call schedule.
The glitch that only shows up at shift change
Everyone understands that boundary their own way, and in the middle of a shift it never shows: it only shows in the exact second of the handoff
- The routing rules are written down where the whole team can see them, with priority over the schedule when the two compete
- The on-call schedule covers the whole week, with no gaps between one shift and the next
- It was tested with a real message, and exactly one person picked it up, not two, not zero
- You also tested the exact moment of shift change, which is where everything else tends to fail
Test yourself
Answer before opening each one. If one gives you trouble, go back to the section that explains it.
1. A customer with an assigned person writes in with a question the bot doesn't cover, and that person isn't on call at the moment. On your routing sheet, you decided that availability wins over the assigned person when that person isn't on call.
Whoever's on call at that moment picks it up, not the assigned person. If that priority isn't written down, the message sits there waiting for a person who can't answer: that's a dropped ball, plain and simple.
2. You write a schedule where one person covers up to 6 p.m. and another takes over from 6 p.m. on. Before you put it into use, what test message do you send, and at exactly what time?
One right at 6 p.m., at the exact second of the handoff, not in the middle of the afternoon. That's the only moment that shows whether two people answer at the handoff or nobody does; at 4 p.m. or 8 p.m. the routing already works fine on its own.
3. You send the test message on a Sunday at 9 p.m. asking to reschedule an appointment, and both people on call that week answer.
There's an assignment rule set up wrong, not a scheduling problem: two rules are assigning the same message to different people at the same time. You fix it by figuring out which one should have given way, not by adding more scheduling.
In Yodai the WhatsApp bot answers with your prices and your hours, and hands the chat over when someone asks for a person. See how the WhatsApp bot for your business works.
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