Most small businesses get thier enquiries at the worst time. A student finishes work at night, opens WhatsApp, and asks a study-abroad consultancy, "What documents do I need for Canada?" Nobody replies until 11am the next day. By then the student has messaged other consultancies.

I built a WhatsApp assistant for exactly this case, as a demo for a study-visa consultancy in the Chandigarh area. It answers after-hours enquiries using only the consultancy's own material, collects the student's details for a counsellor, and hands the conversation to a human when it should. It runs on n8n, self-hosted on an AWS EC2 instance.

This post walks through how it works, the design decisions behind it, and what broke along the way.

What the assistant does (and doesn't)

The goal was not a chatbot that "knows everything." It was narrower:

Answer from the consultancy's own material only : services, countries, documents needed, intakes, office addresses.…