Messaging customers
Messaging customers
Messaging is what turns a list into a service. A customer who can walk away and be told when to come back is the whole proposition, and everything in this section is about making that message arrive, be recognised as yours, and not cost more than it needs to.
Two kinds of message
Transactional
About the customer’s own visit — you are next, it is your turn, your booking is tomorrow. They asked for these by joining, so no separate consent is needed.
Marketing
Anything else — an offer, an announcement. Requires explicit consent, carries an unsubscribe link, and is metered separately. See marketing.
Do not dress marketing up as transactional
Slipping an offer into a “your table is ready” message is how a shop gets its number filtered by carriers and its complaints rate up. The separation is not bureaucracy; it is what keeps the important messages arriving.
The five channels
- WhatsApp — sent first, and it tells us whether it arrived. Reaches customers who have WhatsApp, except on US and Canadian numbers.
- Text message — rich RCS where the phone supports it, ordinary SMS where it doesn’t. Reaches any mobile, and by default goes only when WhatsApp didn’t land.
- Web push — free, instant, and only reaches customers who agreed to notifications in their browser. A welcome extra, never enough on its own.
- Email — good for confirmations and details, poor for “come back now”. Does not count against your messaging allowance.
- Voice — an automated call on top of the text, for “it’s your turn”, “next in line” and a late booking. Needs a voice call pack.
How they chain together, and what happens when one fails, is covered in channels and fallback.
What gets sent, and when
There are 19 automatic customer messages, each tied to a moment in a visit or a booking. The wording is Queue Join’s and the same for every business, with your business name in it; what you choose, per message and per location, is which channels send it and when. Most fire from a member of staff pressing something. A few are driven by the clock instead: the booking reminder, the two follow-ups, “Booking running late” (sent by an automation rule) and “Waitlist closed” when the waitlist clears itself at closing time.
The full list, with what each one is for, is in customer messages.
Messaging your own team
Separately from all of this, members of staff can subscribe themselves to alerts — somebody has waited too long, the queue is backing up, a booking was cancelled. See team notifications.
What counts against your allowance
Your plan includes a monthly pool of messages. WhatsApp messages and texts draw on it; push notifications and emails do not. The pool is shared rather than split per channel, because whether a customer ends up with WhatsApp, RCS or SMS depends on their phone, not on anything you chose.
The practical consequence: the default fallback genuinely saves money. A WhatsApp message that was delivered means no text to pay for. Voice calls are separate again: they come from a voice call pack, not from this pool.
When the pool runs out, paid plans keep sending — a customer is always told it is their turn — and the extra messages are paid for from your overage balance if you have overage switched on. The Free plan stops sending WhatsApp messages and texts for the rest of the month; push and email carry on. See plans and billing.