Requesting the WhatsApp assistant

What is the WhatsApp assistant?

An assistant on your WhatsApp number. Your student sends a message, the assistant looks in your real calendar, suggests a time, and only books after the student taps a confirm button. Payment goes via your own payment link. It is a paid extension to your Golfly subscription.

What the assistant does for you

• Recognises your student by their phone number. It sees the first name, the outstanding lesson credit and the upcoming lessons. If it does not know the number, it politely asks for name and email address.
• Names your lesson types, prices and lesson duration as they appear on your own site. It is not allowed to make anything up.
• Looks for free times in your real calendar, up to a week ahead, and offers them as buttons so your student does not have to type.
• Only books after a tap on the confirm button. If the student still has lesson credit, the assistant uses that automatically. If not, it sends a payment button with the amount in it.
• Cancels and reschedules lessons, keeping the credit.
• Sends a reminder about 24 hours before the lesson, only to students who have said yes to that themselves. It asks that after a booking that came off the lesson credit. If a student pays per lesson with iDEAL, they do not get the question and so no reminder goes out to them.
• Speaks Dutch or English, depending on the language your student writes in.
• Stays quiet as soon as you reply yourself. If you type something in WhatsApp, it stays silent for two hours.

You can read back all conversations under Admin, WhatsApp. How that inbox works is described in The WhatsApp inbox.

What it deliberately does not do

This is not a list of things that are coming later, this is how it works today. Better that you know beforehand than that a student tells you.

• Cancelling or rescheduling within your own cancellation period. It refuses that and offers to bring you in. It keeps to the period you fill in under Admin, Site settings at Cancelling and rescheduling, by default 24 hours. The free first hour after booking applies on your site; in the chat it does not look at that.
• Refunding money. Never. If a student asks for it, it refers them to you personally.
• Booking right before the lesson. If the requested time falls within your confirmation threshold, you confirm yourself.
• Looking further than a week ahead in the conversation.
• Arranging a lesson card, gift card, group lesson or Swing Check. It has no tools for that.
• Handling small talk, thank-yous and general questions. Outside a running conversation no reply goes back to those. In the middle of a conversation, for example a "great, thank you" right after booking, it says briefly that it cannot help with that and offers to bring you in.
• Starting a conversation itself. WhatsApp only allows free messages within 24 hours of your student's last message. Outside that, only the lesson reminder can be sent.
• Replying from your panel. The inbox is for reading along and ticking off, you type in WhatsApp itself.

Rescheduling does not always work either. It can only move to a time that can just as well be booked on your site: within your working hours that day, not blocked and still free. If the new time does not fit that, it says so honestly.

What it costs

39 euros per month, on top of your Golfly subscription. For a coach on Pro that becomes 99 plus 39 is 138 euros per month, for Pro with Swing Check 129 plus 39 is 168 euros per month.

You only pay from the moment the assistant is on for your number. Between your sign-up and that moment nothing changes in your subscription. You see the breakdown of your monthly amount under Admin, Subscription; as soon as the assistant is on it appears there as a separate line.

How to sign up

There is no button that switches the assistant on itself. That is a deliberate choice: a real WhatsApp number has to be linked to your account, and we arrange that together with you.

1. Go to Admin, Subscription.
2. In the card Add the WhatsApp assistant, click Sign me up.
3. Done. The card then shows the date of your sign-up, so you do not need to click again.

Your sign-up arrives at Golfly and stays until we pick it up. If you want to tell us something with it straight away, for example that you want to use your club's number, email support@golfly.nl.

What happens next

We contact you. Together we set up:

• which WhatsApp number you want to use, and whether that number is free to link;
• the connection to WhatsApp itself, which runs via Meta;
• the check that your calendar, lesson types and payment connection are right;
• the add-on on your subscription.

Honest about the lead time: connecting your own number runs via an approval at Meta that is still in progress at the moment. As long as it is not in place, we cannot promise when it is your turn. We will let you know as soon as we can continue.

What you need to have in order yourself

The assistant reads exactly the same data as your website. What is not in there does not exist for it.

• Your calendar is right. Weekly schedule plus exceptions. See Setting up availability.
• Your lesson types are on, with name, price and duration. Without lesson types the assistant has nothing to offer.
• Your Mollie connection works. Without Mollie it cannot make a payment link and tells your student that you will take it from there. See Setting up Mollie Connect.
• You have set a primary location. It goes on the booking and as a map pin in the chat.
• Your confirmation threshold is set correctly. If it is on 48 hours, everything within two days ends up with you anyway.
• Your students' phone numbers are in the +31 form. If a number is stored differently in your client base, the assistant does not recognise that student and asks for name and email address again.
• Golfly is on your home screen. Otherwise the notification does not arrive when the assistant hands a conversation over to you. See Turning on push notifications.

Try it yourself first

Send a message to +31 85 369 7551. That is the demo line of a made-up coach, Mark van der Meer. The calendar, prices and payment are fake, no money is charged and no lesson ends up in a real coach's calendar.

What you do really see there is the full booking flow, because it runs on exactly the same code as for a real coach. What you do not see there is your own inbox, the lesson reminder and how the assistant behaves with a full calendar.

Because the demo line does not know your number, the assistant asks for your name and email address first. With your own students that only happens for new people.