Module 3 finale. Flip the switch from staging to production. Real Meta-verified number, real Anthropic billing, real customers, real-time dashboard. By the end, the agent is in production and you have visibility on every conversation, every error, every latency spike. Running cost: under $100/month for thousands of customer chats.
Each step has concrete outputs. By the end: the agent is live, the dashboard is watching, real customers are texting in.
Production cannot tolerate silent failures the way staging did. Every API key → environment variable (never commit secrets). Wrap every external call (Claude, OpenAI, vector DB, Meta) in retry-with-backoff. Add timeouts. Global error handler catches everything and logs it — never 500 back to Meta or you'll get throttled.
In Meta Business: request migration from the free test number to your real verified number. Meta runs a quick check, usually clears in under an hour. Update phone-number ID in env vars (it changes!). Point webhook URL at your production server. Re-subscribe to the 'messages' field. Self-test with your own phone before announcing.
3 layers of visibility. LOGS: every incoming message, every Claude response, every error → Logflare or Axiom. METRICS: convos/hour, response latency, % failed calls. ALERTS: Slack ping if error rate goes above 5% for 10 min; Slack ping if a conversation takes more than 30 sec. Without the dashboard, the agent silently rots.
Things WILL fail. Every failure path ends in acceptable customer experience. Claude times out → polite holding message + queue for retry. KB returns nothing → generic on-brand reply + flag for review. Meta throttles → queue + exponential backoff. Everything fails → hand off to a human number via WhatsApp. Never silent drop.
Don't broadcast to your whole list on day one. Pick 10 loyal customers. Text them: 'we just launched an AI assistant on WhatsApp — try it'. Watch dashboard live for the first hour. Read every conversation. Note where the agent struggles. Patch KB, tune prompt, re-test. Then open to 100, then 1,000. Improves every week.
Top AI Africa deploys the full 5-layer stack for African businesses. Webhook, Claude integration, Knowledge Base on your real product data, production deploy with monitoring dashboard. Free 15-min strategy call to see if your business is a fit.