The short version: You set up automatic WhatsApp Business replies through Settings, then Business Tools, where you’ll find three separate features: the greeting message, the away message and quick replies. Each one does a different job, none of them is a chatbot, and knowing that distinction stops you wasting an afternoon looking for automation that the free app simply doesn’t offer.
I get asked this question almost every week by clients who’ve just started setting up a WhatsApp Business account and assume it works like an email autoresponder. It doesn’t, not really. But what it does do is useful once you understand what you’re working with, so let’s go through it, feature by feature, with the actual taps you need to make.
What “automatic reply” means on WhatsApp Business
Here’s the bit that trips people up. The free WhatsApp Business app gives you three tools that people lump together as “automatic replies”, but they behave very differently:
- Greeting message – sends once, to a new or returning contact who’s been quiet for 14 days or more
- Away message – sends automatically outside the hours you set, or all the time if you switch it on
- Quick replies – not automatic at all, you trigger these yourself by typing a shortcut
None of them read what the customer wrote and respond intelligently. There’s no branching logic, no “if they ask about pricing, send this”. That level of automation only exists on the WhatsApp Business API, which is a different product entirely and usually involves a monthly platform fee on top of the messages themselves. If someone’s promised you a free “smart auto-responder” inside the standard app, they’re describing something that doesn’t exist. I’d rather tell you that now than have you spend an hour hunting through menus for a setting that isn’t there.
Setting up the away message (step by step)
This is the one most small businesses want first, especially if you’re a one-person operation answering WhatsApp from your phone between other jobs. Here’s exactly how to do it:
- Open WhatsApp Business and tap the three dots (Android) or Settings (iPhone)
- Tap Business tools
- Tap Away message
- Toggle it on
- Write your message, up to 139 characters if you want it to display cleanly without truncating on smaller screens
- Choose your schedule: Always send, Custom schedule, or Outside of business hours
- Choose your audience: Everyone, Everyone except your contacts, or specific contacts
The “Outside of business hours” option only works if you’ve already filled in your business hours under Business Profile, so do that first if you haven’t. It sounds obvious but it’s the single most common reason people tell me their away message “isn’t working” when it’s just never triggering.
The real story behind why this matters
A client of mine, a florist working out of a small unit near Tunbridge Wells, switched her away message on before a two-week trip and set it to “Always send” instead of a proper schedule. She came back to find three genuine, ready-to-book wedding enquiries who’d each received the same “we’re away, back soon” reply and then simply gone to a competitor because nobody followed up. The message worked exactly as built. The problem was she treated the away message as a substitute for checking in, rather than what it is: a holding line that buys you a few hours, not a few weeks. If you’re going to be unreachable for more than two or three days, an away message on its own isn’t a plan, it’s a gap with a polite sign on it.
Setting up the greeting message
The greeting message fires the first time someone messages you, or after 14 days of silence from that contact. Setup is nearly identical:
- Settings, then Business tools
- Tap Greeting message
- Toggle it on
- Write your message
- Choose your recipients (Everyone is usually right here)
This is the message that shapes first impressions before you’ve said a single human word to someone, so it’s worth getting right rather than leaving the default text. I’ve written a full breakdown of how to phrase a warm greeting message that doesn’t sound like a form letter, and if you want ready-made options rather than starting from a blank box, there’s also a set of greeting message templates worth stealing and adjusting to your own voice.
One practical note: keep it under two short sentences. A greeting message that reads like a terms and conditions page gets skimmed and ignored. Something like “Thanks for messaging Bullock Consulting, we usually reply within a few hours, in the meantime feel free to tell us what you need” does more work than three paragraphs of formal welcome text.
Setting up quick replies
Quick replies are the underrated feature here, because unlike the other two, you use them constantly, not just when you’re absent.
- Settings, then Business tools, then Quick replies
- Tap the plus icon
- Write the full message
- Set a shortcut, which must start with a forward slash, for example /pricing or /hours
- Save it
Then in any chat, type the shortcut, tap it when it appears above the keyboard, and the full message drops in instantly. You get up to 50 saved quick replies in the free app, which is enough for most small businesses if you group them sensibly: opening hours, pricing ranges, delivery times, refund policy, booking link, and so on. I keep mine organised so my most-used five are named with letters near the top of the alphabet, because the list sorts alphabetically and you don’t want to be scrolling past thirty replies to find the one you use ten times a day.
What automation you can’t get from the free app
This is the part most guides skate past because it’s less flattering to write about. The free app cannot:
- Read the content of an incoming message and choose which reply to send
- Send a sequence of follow-up messages over several days
- Integrate with your CRM, booking system or email list
- Run outside of the one device the app is installed on, without WhatsApp Web as a workaround
- Send bulk automatic broadcasts to people who haven’t messaged you first
That last one catches people out constantly. If you’re thinking about automatic replies because you want to send messages out at scale, that’s a broadcast question, not an auto-reply question, and the pricing works completely differently once you’re outside the 24-hour customer service window. Worth reading up on what WhatsApp Business broadcast messages cost before you assume automation is free just because your greeting message is.
To get real automation, meaning a bot that answers FAQs based on keywords, books appointments, or hands off to a human when it hits a wall, you need the WhatsApp Business API, accessed through a provider such as Twilio, 360dialog or a platform like Sirena or Zoko sitting on top of it. That’s a different setup entirely, usually costing anywhere from £30 to £300 a month depending on volume, plus per-message fees. It’s not something you toggle on in Settings, and it’s not something most sole traders and small teams need, at least not on day one.
The uncomfortable bit nobody puts in these guides
Automatic replies make people feel safer than they should. I’ve seen business owners switch on an away message and quick replies, then quietly relax their response times because “it’s covered”. It isn’t. A greeting message tells someone you exist. It does not answer their actual question, book their appointment, or close their sale. Customers on WhatsApp expect a real reply fast, several surveys put the expectation at under an hour during business hours, and an automated message that never gets followed up with a human answer reads, after the first exchange, as being ignored rather than helped. The tools in this article buy you time. They are not a replacement for someone checking the app.
Getting the app itself right first
None of these features will appear correctly if you’re running an old version of the app, and I’ve had two separate calls this year that turned out to simply be an update problem rather than a settings problem. If your Business tools menu looks different from what I’ve described, or a toggle is missing entirely, check you’re running the current build before you do anything else.
Is it worth paying for more than the free app?
Before you look at paid automation tools, it’s worth being clear-eyed about what the free version costs you, because “free” comes with real limits worth knowing, covered in this piece on whether WhatsApp Business is really free or has hidden charges. For most businesses under about five staff and a few hundred WhatsApp conversations a month, the free app’s greeting message, away message and quick replies cover it. Once you’re getting fifty or more enquiries a day, missing replies during evenings and weekends, or wanting the bot to qualify a lead before a human steps in, that’s the point to look at API-based tools, or bring in someone who can set it up rather than trying to bolt it together yourself over a weekend. If you’re weighing that decision, it’s worth reading through what an AI consultant for a small business does before you commit budget to a platform you might not need yet.
A simple setup checklist
- Fill in Business Profile hours and description first
- Write and switch on the greeting message
- Write and schedule the away message correctly, not just “Always send”
- Build five to ten quick replies for your most repeated questions
- Check the whole flow by messaging your own business number from a second phone or WhatsApp Web
- Diary a weekly ten-minute review of what customers ask, and update your quick replies accordingly
That last step is the one people skip and it’s the one that keeps the whole thing useful rather than stale. I review mine monthly and I still find myself deleting quick replies nobody’s used in six months and adding new ones for questions that have started coming up since a product change.
More on WhatsApp: the complete WhatsApp guide groups all of these by problem.
Frequently asked questions
Can I have more than one away message active at once?
No, the free WhatsApp Business app only lets you have one away message live at a time, though you can edit it as often as you like, so many businesses swap the wording seasonally, for holidays, or for specific closures rather than trying to run several versions simultaneously.
Does the greeting message send every single time someone messages me?
No, it sends the first time a contact messages you and then again only after 14 days of no contact between you, so regular customers who message weekly won’t see it repeatedly, which is exactly why it works well as a genuine welcome rather than a nag.
Can automatic replies work if my phone is off?
No, the standard WhatsApp Business app runs on the device it’s installed on, so if that phone is off or has no signal, away messages, greeting messages and quick replies all stop working until it reconnects, which is the main reason larger teams move to the API version hosted on a server rather than a handset.
What’s the difference between an away message and a chatbot?
An away message sends one fixed piece of text based on time or absence, with no understanding of what the customer wrote, while a chatbot, only available through the WhatsApp Business API, can read keywords or intent and respond differently depending on the question, which is a different product built for higher message volumes.
