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.

What happens to your phone when you close for the holidays

By André Bergan, 2026-11-06

If you're planning to close for part of December, there are two things to decide, not one. Your exact dates, and what happens to the calls and WhatsApps that keep landing while you're away. Most owners only sort out the first, with a vague away message, and it costs them more than they realise.

The dates, so you can plan around them

Black Friday in South Africa falls on Friday, 27 November this year, according to the public holiday calendars. December then brings three public holidays: Day of Reconciliation on Wednesday the 16th, Christmas Day on Friday the 25th, and the Day of Goodwill on Saturday the 26th, the government's public holiday list shows. Put a week either side of those and a lot of trade businesses end up closed from the third week of December right into the first week of January.

That's three or four weeks a year where your phone and your WhatsApp don't stop, even though you do.

Why this window is worse than any other quiet patch

Every other time you close, a weekend, say, people mostly know you'll be back Monday. This stretch is different for two reasons.

First, it's exactly when people want jobs done, not later. A geyser that's been limping along all year suddenly has to work before the family arrives. A car gets booked in for a service before the drive to the coast. Someone wants their hair done before the work party. Nobody wants to hear "back on the 5th" when the job needs doing on the 20th. They'll just phone the next name on the list.

Second, you're gone for longer than a weekend, so the backlog is bigger. Come back from three weeks away and a generic WhatsApp away message usually has a pile of replies with no way to tell which ones are still live, which already found someone else, and which were actually urgent and needed a call that week, not a reply in January.

What to actually do about it

A few things that cost nothing and make a real difference:

Decide your exact closing and reopening dates now, and say them the same way everywhere: your WhatsApp status, your Google Business Profile, your voicemail greeting. "Back soon" gets ignored. A date doesn't.
Split "can wait" from "can't wait." If you're taking genuine emergencies over the break, no electricity, a burst pipe, say so and give a way to reach you for that one case, kept separate from ordinary enquiries.
Still capture the job, not just the message. "I'll be back on the 5th" tells a customer nothing about whether you even know what they need. Ask what the job is while you've got their attention, even if you can't start it until January. You come back to a sorted list instead of forty "hi, are you still open" messages to work through.
Don't let the quiet weeks go to someone else. December is a busy trading month for small businesses (The Citizen), not a quiet one you can afford to skip. The quotes and small jobs that would've been yours on a normal week don't wait for you to get back from leave.

Where Hannah fits

This is the exact gap we built Hannah to close. Add your shutdown dates and one line saying when you're back to your dashboard, and she tells every caller and every WhatsApp when you're back, works out whether something sounds genuinely urgent and flags it to you straight away, and still takes down the details of every other enquiry properly, so it's sitting in your dashboard, sorted, when you're back. You don't come home to a guessing game. You come home to a list. Have a look at how that works on our receptionist page.