How to take bookings on KakaoTalk: a setup guide for Korean salons in Australia

To take bookings inside KakaoTalk, you connect Biseo's AI assistant (a chatbot) to your KakaoTalk business channel. You build the bot in Kakao's Chatbot Admin Centre (Open Builder), point it at Biseo's webhook URL, deploy it and connect it to your live channel. Clients can then ask questions and book just by chatting, without leaving KakaoTalk. In Biseo this needs the Growth plan or above.

Biseo is booking software for beauty salons in Australia, in Korean and English. It connects its customer AI assistant to your KakaoTalk channel so a client can book by chatting, as they would with a person. This guide is the full setup, written after we went through it ourselves from start to finish, including the points where we got stuck.

Before you start

You need Biseo's Growth plan or above. The feature is locked on Starter and Free.
You need a KakaoTalk business channel already. If you don't have one, create it first in Kakao Business.
Once your channel is open, the Biseo team can help you with the connection if you'd rather not do the steps below yourself. Email us at hello@biseo.com.au.

Setup steps

In the Biseo admin screen (Settings > Booking Page), find your webhook URL. It's created automatically the first time you open that page.
In the Kakao Business partner centre, go to Channel > Chatbot connection and choose "Create with Chatbot Admin Centre".

⚠️Warning

Don't choose "Create with Chatbot Helper". It's a simple FAQ bot that can't connect to an external server, so there's no way to link it to Biseo's AI assistant.
In Open Builder, register one skill and paste the webhook URL you copied in step 1 exactly as it is. No separate authentication header is needed.
Connect this skill to the fallback block, which receives every message that doesn't match another rule.

🚨Caution

This is where most people get stuck. The fallback block already contains Kakao's default wording ("I'm not sure what you want" and so on). If you don't delete it, that fixed text keeps going out first even after the skill is connected. Delete it and replace it with the skill data.
Click Deploy in the left menu and set the bot's status to "Running". Before it's deployed, the bot never replies on your real channel.
Check the bot ID in the Open Builder settings, paste it into the Biseo admin screen, switch the toggle on and save.
Last, connect the channel. This step needs care too.

📌Important

You must connect to the "live channel". If you connect to the "test channel", everything looks fine inside Open Builder's own testing, but a message sent from the real KakaoTalk app gets no reply, and no error is recorded either. Only an account with channel master permission can connect the live channel.

Testing

Send any message to the channel you connected. Sometimes an interim reply such as "Thinking 🤔" arrives first and the real answer follows a few seconds later. Both are normal. Keep going with a booking conversation and a confirmation card with buttons appears. Press confirm and the booking is created for real.

Where people get stuck

Symptom	Cause
Only Kakao's default wording keeps appearing	The text reply in the fallback block wasn't deleted
"This channel isn't connected"	The secret in the webhook URL is wrong, or the bot ID wasn't saved
No reply at all from the real KakaoTalk app, and no error record	The bot is connected to the test channel instead of the live channel

If the table doesn't solve it, our troubleshooting guide for when the AI assistant on your KakaoTalk channel isn't replying goes through each cause in more detail.

Once KakaoTalk booking is ready, the enquiries that used to be spread across Instagram DMs, phone calls and KakaoTalk end up in one place. Start free and see it for yourself.