21:50 on a Friday. A message lands on the company number: مساء الخير. A minute later, "do u have slots sat morning?" Then a voice note, forty seconds, in Arabic.
The colleague who reads Arabic is back on Monday. The person on shift opens the thread, sees three lines they cannot read, and does the only thing available to them, which is nothing. By Monday the customer has booked with whoever answered.
The hard part of running a bilingual inbox in the UAE is not translation. It is handover.
What a mixed thread actually looks like
Open ten threads from a Dubai or Sharjah customer base and most of this turns up in one conversation:
- The greeting is Arabic and the question is English.
- One sentence carries both: "can you send me the price لو سمحت".
- A number arrives as ٠٥٠ ١٢٣ ٤٥٦٧ rather than 050 123 4567, so searching for 050 returns nothing.
- The detail that matters is in a voice note.
- The profile name is محمد, and your CRM has him as Mohd.
None of that troubles the person who has been on the thread since the start. All of it troubles the next person.
Arabizi is how people actually type
A lot of Arabic arrives written in Latin letters and digits, because the keyboard is set to English and switching is a nuisance. The digits stand in for sounds English does not have.
| Typed | Sound | Letter |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | glottal stop | ء |
| 3 | 'ayn | ع |
| 5 or 7' | kh | خ |
| 6 | emphatic t | ط |
| 7 | heavy h | ح |
| 9 | emphatic s | ص |
So "3andkom mawa3eed bukra?" asks whether you have appointments tomorrow. There is no standard spelling: the same word reaches you five ways in a week, and translation tools often read it as broken English and hand back nonsense.
Two consequences. Auto-replies that match on keywords are unreliable against Arabizi, so do not build after-hours or FAQ handling on exact strings. And reply in proper Arabic or in English, never in Arabizi — the customer typed in Latin letters for keyboard convenience, not as a request for the company to write that way.
Right-to-left breaks layouts, quietly
Direction is decided run by run, not line by line. An Arabic sentence with a Latin brand name and a price in it is a mix of right-to-left and left-to-right pieces, and the punctuation at the end belongs to whichever run the software thinks it belongs to. A question mark can land on the wrong side of the sentence.
Where this bites: the one-line preview in a conversation list truncates the wrong end, showing the least useful part of the message. A mixed line pasted into a CRM note reorders itself. And a tool that sets one direction for the whole screen lays every Arabic message out as if it were English, which your Arabic-speaking staff notice on day one and resent quietly until they go back to their phones.
Send yourself a test line: an Arabic sentence, a Latin brand name, a price with a comma, and a question mark at the end. Look at where the question mark lands, on desktop and on a phone.
Mohammed, Mohamed, Mohd, محمد
Three staff save the same customer three times, each typing what they heard. Now the history is split across three contacts and nobody can find the quote from March.
The rules that fix this are dull and they work:
- The phone number is the only stable key. Store it in full international form, +9715…, in the inbox and in the CRM, with no local 050 variants.
- Search by the last five digits, never by the name.
- Agree one transliteration convention and write it where new staff see it. Al or El, hyphen or space, Mohammed or Mohamed. Which rule you pick matters far less than having one.
- Keep the Arabic form next to the Latin one, in the same field: Mohammed Al Blooshi — محمد البلوشي — also written Mohd.
- Never merge or de-duplicate contacts on name. Merge on number or not at all.
One more: the name shown on WhatsApp is the profile name the customer set for themselves. It might be their company, a flower emoji, or blank. It is not their name, and it should not be what your team searches on.
Answering in their language, keeping the record readable
Two rules, and the second one is the one people get wrong.
Reply in the language of the message you are replying to. An Arabic question gets an Arabic answer. Not a translated summary, not "our team speaks English".
Nobody sends a message in a language they cannot read. If software translates an agent's English into Arabic and sends it under their name, that agent has put a price, a date and a promise in front of a customer without being able to check any of it. A wrong price sent in the company's name is the worst thing that can come out of an inbox. Translation is something you ask for deliberately, with someone who can read the result — not something a draft button does to you.
Those two rules only sit together if you separate the message from the record.
The message goes out in the customer's language. The record wrapped around it — the note, the assignment, the handover — is written in the language the whole team reads, usually English. The Arabic reply stays exactly as sent, checkable by whoever sent it, and the note above it says what the thread is about.
A useful note is three lines and takes twenty seconds:
- what they want, in your words
- what was quoted or promised, in the exact figures used
- what happens next, and by when
"Followed up" is not a note. Neither is a thumbs up.
Voice notes need the same treatment. A forty-second Arabic voice note cannot be handed to anybody. Whoever listens to it types three lines into the note before they move on, or asks the customer, in their own language, to send it as text.
This is where a shared inbox is genuinely the answer. In Go Talk IQ a question asked in Arabic is answered in Arabic, a person can take the conversation over from the assistant at any point, and the note left on the thread is there for whoever picks it up next. The reply belongs to the customer's language; the record belongs to the team's.
You might not need software for this yet
If one person handles all the Arabic and ten messages come in a day, no tool beats what you already have. Three things do more than any purchase:
- The number belongs to the company, not to a person's handset.
- One transliteration convention, written down.
- A note discipline, even if the notes live in a WhatsApp group.
The moment software starts to matter is specific and you will recognise it: two people answer the same number and reply on top of each other; a customer's history exists only on one phone; somebody hands in their notice and three years of conversations walk out with the handset.
A caveat worth more than a feature list: no tool fixes a team that does not write notes. It only makes the missing notes visible faster.
Six checks to run against what you use today
- Paste an Arabic sentence containing a Latin price and a trailing question mark. Where does the question mark land, on desktop and on a phone.
- Search a contact by the last five digits of their number. Does it find them.
- Search a name you know was saved two ways. How many contacts come back.
- Open a thread you did not handle. In ten seconds, can you tell what was promised.
- Hand that thread to someone who reads no Arabic. What do they have to go on.
- Send yourself ٠٥٠ and search for 050.
Go Talk IQ is a shared inbox for the WhatsApp Business number you already use — same number, no migration, and it looks like WhatsApp Web because that is what everybody already knows. Arabic and English both work, and notes and handovers travel with the thread rather than with the phone. The free plan covers one number and two people, which is enough to run all six checks on your own conversations.
Also worth reading: sharing one number with multiple users · an after-hours policy you can copy