Wafeq runs the books for businesses across Saudi Arabia and the UAE: invoicing, VAT, ZATCA e-invoicing compliance, financial reporting. Its customers write in Arabic, on WhatsApp, and they are usually asking about something with a filing deadline attached.
Accounting Questions Do Not Tolerate an Approximate Answer
Support for a payments app can afford to be roughly right. Support for the software a business files its VAT through cannot. A wrong answer about a tax treatment does not annoy the customer — it puts a filing at risk.
The rules are also jurisdictional. ZATCA e-invoicing requirements in Saudi Arabia are not the UAE’s requirements, and Wafeq serves both from the same product, with WhatsApp business numbers on each side of the border.
And it happens in Arabic. Wafeq’s help centre is Arabic-first, its customers write in Arabic, and an accounting answer that is fluent but imprecise is worse than no answer at all.
An Agent That Files Its Own Paperwork
Open runs on WhatsApp and web chat, in front of Zendesk, answering from the Wafeq academy help centre in Arabic and English.
The part that matters to an accounting team is what happens after the answer. Every conversation the agent resolves writes a Zendesk ticket carrying the AI summary and the full transcript, tagged and left open. Nothing closes silently.
On the messaging side it then releases switchboard control back to Zendesk, which solves the messaging ticket and stamps the reason for the closure onto the session. A CSAT survey fires on the same trigger.
Wafeq’s own agents work those tickets — reviewing what the AI resolved and completing the fields their reporting depends on. That review loop is the point, not an overhead: in a compliance product, an automated answer nobody can audit is not an asset.
The Results
Open’s AI agent now handles the majority of Wafeq’s inbound support:
| Metric | Impact |
|---|---|
| Automation rate | 44% |
| Tickets resolved (90 days) | 9,883 of 13,477 |
| Channels covered | WhatsApp and web chat |
| Handoff destination | Reviewed in Zendesk |
The 73% is scoped: 9,883 inbound tickets resolved against 13,477 across the channels integrated at the time, over a trailing ninety-day window. It covers WhatsApp and web chat. Voice runs elsewhere and is not part of this number.
The Impact
73% automation across WhatsApp and web chat lets a support team of thirteen serve businesses in two countries without scaling headcount proportionally with the customer base. Zendesk stayed; nothing was migrated.
For a business owner mid-filing, the difference is that a question in Arabic on WhatsApp at nine at night gets a precise answer, and the answer is on the record for someone at Wafeq to check in the morning.
