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, sound like you, 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, no separate consent is needed, and they are always sent.
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 four channels
- Rich messaging and SMS — the workhorse. Goes to any phone with a number, and is the only channel that reliably reaches somebody who has walked out of your shop.
- Web push — free, instant, and only reaches customers who agreed to notifications in their browser. Excellent as a first attempt, useless 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, for the moment that really matters when nothing else has worked.
How they chain together, and what happens when one fails, is covered in channels and fallback.
What gets sent, and when
There are 18 automatic customer messages, each tied to a moment in a visit or a booking. Every one can be switched off, reworded, and configured differently per channel and per location. Most fire from a member of staff pressing something; three are driven by the clock.
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. Rich messages and SMS draw on it; push notifications and emails do not. The pool is shared rather than split per channel, because the network decides on a handset-by-handset basis whether a message goes rich or falls back to SMS — a per-channel cap would refuse sends based on a routing decision you never made.
The practical consequence: choosing the right fallback condition genuinely saves money. A push that landed means no SMS to pay for. See plans and billing.