A minimarket in Sidi Bishr
Mona runs a minimarket in Sidi Bishr, Alexandria, and most of her orders come by WhatsApp. Hagga Fatma never types: she sends a voice note, “a kilo of sugar, a bottle of oil and two boxes of cheese, the usual one”. A young mother sends a photo of a list stuck on her fridge. A new customer sends only his location and “the same as my neighbour”. Mona used to listen, read and answer each one by hand, between customers at the till.
With the front desk, each of these messages reaches the same place: an order from her real products and prices, read back to the customer, waiting for his “yes”.
Voice notes
- A voice note of up to 3 minutes is turned into text, in Egyptian Arabic or English, helped by your own product names so “rumi cheese” comes out right.
- When it is clear, the text is treated as the customer's message and the order is built as usual.
- When it is not quite sure, the assistant first reads back what it understood, “You want a kilo of sugar, one bottle of oil and two boxes of cheese, right?”, before it proposes anything.
- When it makes no sense (noise, a voice note sent by mistake), there is no guessing: the customer gets “I heard … Did you mean …? If not, could you type it or send it again?”, with your closest product names.
The audio itself is never kept: only the written text, which your team sees in the inbox with how sure it was, like “transcribed, 82% sure”.
Pictures and locations
- A product photo (an empty pack, a bottle): the assistant looks for it among your products and tells the price, or that it is sold out.
- A handwritten list or a prescription: it reads the lines, matches them to your products and proposes the order with its total, for the customer to confirm.
- Anything else: it says what it sees and asks what the customer wants.
- A location becomes the delivery address of the order, with the name of the place when WhatsApp sends one.
Pictures up to 5 MB are kept in your shop's storage, and your team sees them in the inbox. If that storage is full, the picture is not kept and the customer is asked to describe it in words.
Handing over to your team
The assistant hands the conversation over when the customer asks for a person (“I want to talk to someone”), on a complaint, on a question your products and your answers do not cover, on something outside your rules, when something fails, or when the day's answers are used up. Your team can also press Take over at any time. Then:
- The assistant stops, and the customer gets one line: a member of the team will answer here.
- A WhatsApp mark lights up at the top of the program and on the Sell screen.
- In Front desk, under Needs you, your team reads the whole conversation with the voice texts, the pictures and the locations, presses Assign to me, and replies.
- When it is sorted, Return to the assistant and it carries on.
If nobody answers within 15 minutes (you choose the minutes), the owner gets an alert, once. The inbox is open to the owner, the managers and the cashiers allowed to see customers.
What is kept, and for how long
- Messages and pictures are kept 90 days; the audio of a voice note is not kept at all.
- A card number or a password a customer types is hidden before the message is kept or sent anywhere.
- A customer who writes “stop” or “وقف” gets one confirmation and nothing more, and the owner can erase a customer's conversation from the inbox.
What it does not do yet
• It is coming with the next update, not in your account today.
• Voice notes over 3 minutes are not written out.
• The inbox shows the voice note's text, not the audio, because the audio is not kept.
• After 24 hours from the customer's last message, WhatsApp does not allow your team a free reply until the customer writes again.
• Cash on delivery only, and no marketing messages.
• It is not in the program on your PC; it is part of PosMasr Cloud.
Which plans include it
The front desk is an add-on on Business and Chain (200 and 600 AI answers a day), and it is in the 14-day trial (30 a day). It costs 750 EGP a month. Voice notes, pictures and the hand-off come with it, at no extra step. The full comparison is on the PosMasr Cloud page.
Quick answers
Does it understand Franco?
Yes: Egyptian Arabic, English and Franco like “3ayez 2 kilo ruz”, and it answers in the customer's own way of writing.
Can it order something I do not sell?
No. An order is built only from your online shop's products; a line it cannot match is asked about or left to your team.
Can the customer ask for a person straight away?
Yes, at any moment. The assistant stops at once and your team answers in the same chat.
How do orders reach the till?
Through your online shop, like any online order; see the front desk and orders.
Let your customers order the way they talk
The front desk is coming with the next update. Start the 14-day trial of Business today, no card, and get your products and your online shop ready for it.
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