What does Heyhannah actually do?

Hannah is an AI receptionist for your business. She answers every call and message 24/7, asks the right questions about the job, and sends you the lead on WhatsApp within seconds, so you never lose an enquiry because you couldn't pick up. If you need a website, we build and run one for you as part of the package.

R1,999 a month with 100 minutes of calls included, or R23,988 a year with 150 minutes a month. Extra minutes are R6 each and Hannah never stops answering. A website is included if you need one, and that package is for one business at one location with a small team (up to 5 people). Businesses with several branches, a bigger team or a lot of calls get a custom package.

How does call forwarding work?

You forward your existing mobile number to your Heyhannah number by dialling a few short codes on your phone. It takes about three minutes and works on all the major South African networks; rain is the one exception, so talk to us first if you're on it. When you're available, turn forwarding off and answer calls yourself. When you're busy, turn it on and Hannah handles everything.

Does it sound like a real person?

She holds a normal conversation rather than reading a script: she answers with your business name, listens, asks follow-up questions about the job, and reads the details back to check she got them right. If she mishears something she asks again instead of guessing.

What happens during load shedding?

Heyhannah runs in the cloud, so it keeps answering calls even when your office has no power. This is one of the biggest advantages: you never miss a call due to load shedding again. WhatsApp summaries are delivered over mobile data.

Can it handle Afrikaans callers?

Ja. Hannah can run entirely in Afrikaans: she greets your callers in Afrikaans and understands them in Afrikaans, not just English with an accent. We set your language when we set your account up, and each Hannah answers in one language, so tell us which one your customers actually phone in.

How is this different from a normal answering service?

An answering service takes a message, usually charged per call and often only during business hours. Hannah answers every hour of the day and actually qualifies leads: she asks what they need, when, and how to reach them, and you get a structured WhatsApp message, not a vague callback note. A full-time receptionist doing the same job averages R7,865 a month for office hours alone (Indeed, September 2026).

What about data privacy?

Heyhannah is fully POPIA compliant. We don't collect ID numbers, bank details, or other sensitive information. Call data is stored securely and you can request deletion at any time.

How does billing work?

Pay monthly or yearly. Monthly has no contract: you're billed when you sign up and then each month, and you can cancel anytime. Yearly is paid once for 12 months and renews each year, with an email reminder well before it does. Hannah can be answering your calls within 24 hours of you finishing setup, and if you're not happy in your first 30 days, tell us and we refund your first payment in full, monthly or yearly.

How to ask for a Google review without annoying your customer

By André Bergan, 2026-10-14

There's no clever trick to this. The ask that actually gets reviews is short, sent to every customer the same way, and sent while the job is still fresh in their mind. Most businesses either never ask at all, or only ask the customers they're confident were happy, which is a habit Google is now actively checking for.

I wrote about Google's 2026 review rules a couple of weeks ago: no discounts for reviews, no asking only the happy customers, no staff quotas. This is the other half, the part where I tell you how to actually ask, in a way that's both compliant and doesn't feel like begging.

Get your own review link first

Google gives every Business Profile a shareable link for exactly this. Open your profile, go to "Read reviews", then select "Get more reviews" (the share icon), and you'll get a plain link you can copy, or a QR code you can download, straight from your own listing. You can also put the link on receipts or at the end of a chat, and Google's help pages say the same (support.google.com/business/answer/16816815). The QR code currently only generates from a desktop browser, not your phone, so do it once from a laptop and save the image.

That link is most of the trick. It drops the customer straight onto the "leave a review" screen for your actual listing, no searching for your business name, no scrolling past three competitors first.

Send it on WhatsApp, not email

South African small businesses already live on WhatsApp for this kind of thing. Standard Bank's Township Informal Economy Report, published in October 2025, found that 74% of the businesses it surveyed use WhatsApp for marketing and communication, well ahead of Instagram at 47% and a business website at 30% (businessday.co.za). That's a survey of township businesses specifically, not every small business in the country, but it matches what anyone doing this work on the ground already knows: a link in a WhatsApp message gets opened, a link that only arrives by email mostly doesn't.

Send the review link as its own message, right after you've been paid or the job's marked done, while the work is still fresh. Keep it plain: "Thanks for choosing us, if you've got two minutes we'd really appreciate a quick Google review: [link]." No instructions on what to write, no mention of a discount, and no "only if you're happy with the work" qualifier tacked on the end.

Ask every customer, not just the ones you're sure of

Here's where instinct works against you. You finish a job you're not completely confident about, so you quietly skip sending the link to that customer and send it to the easier jobs instead. That's exactly the selective asking Google's current guidelines treat as review gating, whether you meant it that way or not. Offering a discount for a review is banned the same way, as fake engagement (support.google.com/business/answer/3474050).

The honest fix is also the simpler one. Send the same message to every paying customer, every time, with no filtering. If a job genuinely went wrong, that's a conversation to have with the customer directly, not a reason to quietly leave them off the list.

Don't chase it twice

One follow up, about a week later, if they haven't left a review yet. After that, let it go. A second nudge reads as nagging, and nagging is the one thing that can turn a customer who was neutral about leaving a review into one who leaves a review about being nagged.

The part that actually takes effort

The message itself is the easy bit. The hard part in practice is remembering who to send it to and when, especially once you're doing a dozen jobs a month and the ones from three weeks ago have blurred together. Every call and WhatsApp enquiry Hannah takes gets logged against the job and the contact, so when a job's marked done you're not trying to recall from memory who you worked for last Tuesday, it's sitting there in the dashboard waiting. If you want to see what that looks like, have a look at what Hannah does.