I get a lot of actionable information via WhatsApp these days. Sadly, people just don’t respond to email in the same way these days.
What to do? WhatsApp isn’t a scriptable platform. In fact, it’s slightly hostile to it. The API version is very limiting.
What would you do with WhatsApp if you could integrate it with your PKM? I’m starting to workaround it with userscripts on web.whatsapp.com
Interesting challenge. I have lately been researching tools to centralize communication for business purposes, especially around tech support interactions in software communities, and I know there are some commercial tools that do support WhatsApp integration. So it makes me wonder how they’re doing it. For non-commercial/OS options, there is at least a bridge for Matrix to WhatsApp. Haven’t tried it, but once you get it into Matrix you should have a lot more flexibility:
There is also Rocketchat, which, depending on your goals, may be the better option since it is also open source and implements a full customer support system:
Chatwoot may also support Whatsapp:
Not sure if any of that is helpful or if those are sort of overkill for your needs, but hopefully there’s something useful in there.
Edit: looking at some of these a bit more, they may require some kind of business API access to WhatsApp. I haven’t looked into that to see what it requires, if it costs anything, etc., but that might explain why it’s not easy or available with regular user accounts as you seem to have found…
Thanks once again! Yes, I think the Matrix bridge is probably the best option as I think (!) those other options need the API. There was some talk about possible bans for accessing web.whatsapp.com via Matrix but at the end of the day, WhatsApp shouldn’t be able to identify the bridge too easily, especially if its self hosted. I’m going to look into this one, primarily via 3rd party hosting. It seems like something worth paying for.
Used to offer the bridge. I’m not sure if they still do. It was a break of WhatsApp T+C’s.
DIY looks easy but I believe it needs quite a lot of RAM and it’s a public facing service so not stress free:
Hope this helps someone. Maybe I should have a diary thread for all this.
I reckon this is your diary thread, no? 
I"m not really sure what a diary thread is, but looks like one to me.
I guess you’re both right!
Move this thread to a place for diaries and my apologies!
Here’s a userscript to start to open a dir for a customer via WhatsApp web I had made:
I can’t edit my posts so I’m updating this here.
It should be possible to link into a page even without a URL by looking at the page itself.
A screenreader has access to this so we should too.
We are not so prescriptive or structured here, so this is a perfectly good place for you to chronicle your experience. 
I have bumped you up a “trust level”, so now you should be able to edit your posts here for 30 days.
Thanks.
element.io now has element one for $5/month thanks to the whatsapp multi device beta, so this seems to be less of a problem than it was for using WhatsApp as a ‘CRM’.
I’m making the habit to draft customer messages in Obsidian before pasting them into Element.
Because the Element bot forwards messages from customers, this can be a backup of sorts.
Unfortunately, the Element One bot only supports a single WhatsApp instance at a time so if you use both WhatsApp business and plain WhatsApp, you’ll need to pay twice for that.
However, having access to all of Matrix’s bots and features is surely greatly worth it.
Hope this helps!