How Mall of Qatar put one WhatsApp assistant in front of every visitor question

Mall of Qatar is a large shopping and entertainment destination in Al Rayyan, with hundreds of shops and restaurants, a multi-screen cinema and an edutainment park for children. At that size, answering visitors is part of the experience, not a back-office job. The mall also runs a Gift Card scheme and two separate Avios points programmes, and all of them only work when people understand them.

Before the assistant, visitors asked through the website, a call centre and the information desks on the mall floor. Each channel ran on its own, so the answer a visitor got depended on where they asked and who picked up. The same questions about opening hours, parking and directions arrived on every channel at once.

Gallabox's write-up names four recurring problems. Visitors misunderstood the Gift Card: which shops give a discount, how to buy and use it, how to check the balance, what to do when a card is lost or damaged. They also mixed up the two Avios programmes, Gift Card Avios and Shop and Fly, and arrived expecting something their programme didn't offer.

Events caused a trust problem, because people turned up for promotions that had already ended. And forms for complaints, leasing, job applications and lost property were handled by hand, so they often reached the right team incomplete and late.

Rather than add staff, the mall built one AI virtual assistant on Gallabox's WhatsApp chatbot tools. It answers the everyday questions — hours, the store directory, parking, facilities, location — the same way every time, at any hour of the day.

For the Gift Card, the assistant walks visitors through a fixed sequence: discounts, buying, using, checking the balance and replacing a card. When someone asks about Avios, it explains each programme separately. It lists only events that are still running. For forms, it works out what the visitor wants, collects the details, checks them and sends the request to the right team, then confirms to the visitor that it arrived.

Gallabox reports that 97.7% of visitor queries are resolved in the conversation, and that 89.8% of visitors stay with the bot instead of dropping out halfway, with conversations averaging a little over four messages. It also reports a 46.9% increase in visitor acquisition, measured as new contacts captured.

The operational point is simpler: the call centre and the info desks no longer spend their day on questions that don't need a person, and the mall can take on more conversations without hiring for them. These are Gallabox's figures, and the original story is linked above.

Kuwait's malls, entertainment centres and multi-branch retailers juggle the same split between Instagram DMs, phone lines and front desks, and one WhatsApp assistant drawing on a single source of truth fixes inconsistent answers before it fixes volume. Loyalty and gift-card schemes deserve their own guided path, because those are exactly the questions every staff member answers differently. Give the events list an owner who adds and expires items, or the bot will repeat stale offers faster than any person could. And from 1 October 2026, service replies beyond the free 1,000 a month per number cost $0.044 each in Kuwait, so a bot that settles a question in a few complete messages costs less than one that chats.