Secretaria24hWhatsApp service
We built a service that answers and books appointments on WhatsApp at any hour. This page isn’t the sales pitch. It’s the story of what we saw happening and what we decided because of it.
The product site is in Portuguese.
One factual paragraph, so nobody has to guess what we’re talking about.
Secretaria24h is customer service that runs inside WhatsApp. It replies to whoever gets in touch, explains the professional’s services, gives prices and terms, and books the slot straight into the calendar, within the time ranges set as available. It also understands voice messages, sends a reminder before the date and sends the week’s schedule every Monday. There’s no new app for clients to install: they just send a message. The professional has their own panel, with a dashboard, calendar and profile, but the service happens in the conversation.
Pricing, the feature list, sign-up and the trial are on the product website: secretaria24h.com.br. That’s where it’s sold. Below is our side of the story.
Which is almost never when the professional is free to reply.
The sequence repeated itself so predictably it became almost comical. Someone sends a message at 10 p.m. asking about price and availability. Nobody answers, because at 10 p.m. nobody is working. By the next day they’ve already sorted it out with another professional. The interest was there. What was missing was someone on the other end in the minute it existed.
During working hours the problem changes shape without getting better. Answering messages between one appointment and the next means serving both badly: the client in the room and the one on the phone. And the questions repeat: the same price, the same address, the same “do you take my health insurance?” explained again, several times in the same day.
The traditional solution is to hire a receptionist, and it really does work. But it brings payroll costs, shift schedules, vacations and the day the person doesn’t show up. For independent professionals and small clinics the math rarely works out, so the phone keeps getting answered in the gaps. That segment, the people who aren’t big enough for a front desk, is what made us build it.
The comfortable option was to solve everything with more interface. We went the other way.
The instinct with any product is to have our own app, or at least a booking link with our branding. We ruled out both. Every new channel is one more thing the end client has to learn, and people who don’t fill out forms don’t install an app to book an appointment either. We stayed on the channel they already have open. The cost is real: we depend on a channel that isn’t ours, and people who prefer to call still go unanswered.
It’s worth being precise: there is a panel. The professional logs in at a dedicated address and finds a dashboard, calendar and profile. What we decided was which side it sits on. For the people getting in touch there’s no screen at all: they send a message and that’s it. And for the professional, the panel isn’t a prerequisite. What powers the service comes from the sign-up (services, prices, duration and time blocks like “I don’t work evenings”), and the day-to-day stays in the conversation. An independent professional’s panel usually gets opened the week they sign up and never again; the product was built not to depend on it.
There were two extremes: notify every move, and the professional stays glued to the phone; or notify nothing, and they lose trust in their own calendar. We chose the middle: the week’s schedule arrives every Monday without anyone asking, you can ask how the day looks at any time, and there’s a calendar link to see everything at once. Checking stops being an obligation.
A stated limit is worth more than a superlative, and here there’s a big one, better said up front.
One-time and recurring bookings, rescheduling, reminders before the date, blocking and unblocking the calendar at the professional’s request, answers to questions about the services, the week’s schedule every Monday and a look at the calendar whenever requested. Voice messages are understood. Subscriptions start at R$ 79.90 a month, with no minimum commitment period.
Phone calls. The service happens by message, and making or receiving calls is on the product’s development list, not in what exists today. If your audience calls instead of writing, they still end up in voicemail. It doesn’t process payments either: it gives prices and can send the link you set up, but billing isn’t its job.
The service’s knowledge base is whatever you fill in at sign-up. Poorly described services, vague prices or missing time blocks produce exactly what you’d expect: shallow answers.
Secretaria24h came out of Sincron IA, the same team that builds process automation into client operations. When the bottleneck is bigger than one tool can solve, the path is the Discovery stage.
Sign-up, pricing and the trial are on its website. This text was only meant to explain why it exists.
