Redefining Gov Tech on WhatsApp: how the municipality of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, built the chatbot that citizens love.

By the numbers:

Municipality of San Luis Potosí (capital): approximately 911,908 inhabitants, according to INEGI data. It is the most populous municipality in the state and one of the largest in Mexico.

The City Government of San Luis Potosí is not serving a small population with a caseload that can be handled by hand. It is serving almost a million inhabitants across the municipality and orchestrating inter-agency coordination with metropolitan bodies such as Interapas (water), the Traffic Department, Public Works and Municipal Services. That volume is exactly the scale at which a poorly designed channel breaks down, and where a well-designed channel becomes public policy.

The problem is not local. It is global.

The data confirms this is not an isolated perception. It is a structural crisis of trust:

Globally (OECD data)

And here is the most relevant figure for modern governments: only 56% of citizens aged 18 to 29 are satisfied with public administrative services, against 67% of those over 50. The new generations, digital, multichannel, used to answers in minutes, are the most dissatisfied with their governments across every country surveyed.

Across Latin America (OECD + IDB)

According to the IDB, in-person procedures in Latin America take on average 5.4 hours per task, and 25% require more than one visit by the citizen to the office. Digitised procedures, by contrast, are completed up to 74% faster.

What this means in practice

Behind every statistic there is a scene anyone recognises: the person who took two buses to reach an office and finds out they are missing a copy. The one who waited 40 minutes on the phone only to be transferred to another extension that never answered. The one who sent the report through the web portal six months ago and never knew if it arrived. The one who gave up reporting because they already knew nothing would happen.

This is what the municipality of San Luis Potosí decided to change. And the key decision was not technological, it was a matter of service design: go to the channel where the citizen already is, capture the report in seconds, and, above all, close the loop by letting them know when their problem was solved. Because the global frustration does not come only from waiting. It comes from the silence.

Turning WhatsApp into citizen communication, not just another inbox

The problem was not a lack of channels. It was the lack of a channel where the citizen already was.

“It was about opening a new channel to citizens that is much easier to communicate with, especially for the new generations. Enabling a new technology that is faster than going into a website to report. WhatsApp, well, everyone has it, they can open a chat and write and do everything in minutes.”

Ing. Luis Vera Macías, Director of Technological Innovation, H. Ayuntamiento de San Luis Potosí

WhatsApp, APIs and a little dog named Güicho

1. One number, six service lines

Every citizen writes to the same WhatsApp number: +52 1 444 165 3081. The main menu routes to six use cases:
🛣️ Report a pothole (Public Works)
💡 Street-lighting failure (Municipal Services)
🚰 Water leak (Interapas, metropolitan body)
🏛️ Municipal events
🏘️ Ongoing programs
⚠️ Traffic information (Traffic Department)

2. Geolocation + WhatsApp Flows = friction-free capture

For field reports, Güicho runs a guided flow in seconds. The development team described it:

The citizen just opens the bot and tells it whether they are at the pothole or far from it. If they are at the pothole, they send their location over WhatsApp. The bot returns the street, the number and the neighbourhood. If the person says it is correct, it sends them a WhatsApp Flow that asks for their details, which are optional, and a few questions: whether the street can still be used given the pothole or not, and whether they want to upload an evidence photo, which is also optional. And then it is submitted and the report is generated in our system.

Technological Innovation Team, H. Ayuntamiento de San Luis Potosí

3. Closing the loop: the real differentiator

Here is what sets this case apart from practically any other government WhatsApp implementation in the world. When Public Works resolves a pothole, the field worker uploads the evidence photo to the internal citizen-service system. That automatically triggers a proactive message to the citizen: “Hi Hortencia! I’m Güicho. I’m letting you know that your report has now been solved”, with a photo of the repair attached.

Alongside Güicho is the citizen-service platform where reports are tracked. A report comes in from Güicho, citizen service resolves it, and inside that system we built in the WhatsApp templates. Once it reaches 100%, the citizen gets a message: ‘your report has now been solved’, and they receive an evidence image. And then people reply to us…

Technological Innovation Team, H. Ayuntamiento de San Luis Potosí

People wrote to Güicho as if it were a person. When their problem was fixed, they thanked Güicho. And Güicho replies personally, with little hearts.

Technological Innovation Team, H. Ayuntamiento de San Luis Potosí

Güicho stickers used within the chatbot flow

Why the WhatsApp Business Platform, and why WOZTELL SANUKER

The City Government team was very direct about the criteria for selecting the partner:

I chose you because you had the service of incorporating WhatsApp Flows. Not many have it, and being able to use it as a conversational operations platform. And I said: ah, they have this and it works for me, because it is what I need.

Ing. Luis Vera Macías, Director of Technological Innovation, H. Ayuntamiento de San Luis Potosí

WhatsApp Flows is the component that lets structured forms be captured inside the conversation, without sending the user out to an external browser. For a government project, that solves three problems at once: privacy compliance (personal data is not exposed in open chat), data quality (validated fields, not free text), and flow continuity (the citizen never leaves WhatsApp).

WOZTELL SANUKER provided the conversational operations platform: the chatbot builder with visual nodes, native WhatsApp Flows integration, an open API to connect to the City Government’s internal systems, and the support of an official Meta Business Solution Provider. The learning curve was real, the team openly acknowledges it, but the bet paid off in deployment speed.

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