How text messages work for your visitors

When your business uses text messages, a visitor can ask for two free texts about their place in the line. They type their own number on their own phone, confirm it and tick a box. Nothing is sent before they do.

Text messages are a second way to keep a visitor up to date, for people who do not use WhatsApp or have no mobile data. The visitor joins your line as usual and gets the free tracking link. If you offer texts, the tracking page shows one more button, Get text updates. Tapping it starts the steps below.

• Two texts a visit. Text 1 comes straight away (“you’re number A14 in the line”). Text 2 comes when it is almost their turn.
• The visitor types their own number. Staff can never type or change a visitor’s number for texts.
• Free for the visitor. The texts come out of your pack, never out of their pocket.
• Their place in the line never depends on texts. The tracking page and the lobby TV always work.

Ana runs a bakery in Lisbon. Rui joins the line on his phone and gets number A14. He taps Get text updates. The country already says Portugal, because that is where the bakery is. He types his mobile number, ticks the box that begins Text me up to 2 updates about this visit, and taps Text me.

A new screen asks Is this your number? and shows the number in big digits. Rui taps Yes, text me. His phone buzzes with text 1. Twenty minutes later, text 2 tells him to come back now.

• Nothing, day to day. Visitors do all of this themselves.
• Tell visitors it is free for them and that they can stop any time. Staff should never ask for a number to “put in for them”.
• If a visitor asks for a wrong number to be fixed, they tap Wrong number? Change it on their own phone. It can be done once.
• If you do not want to offer texts, leave text messages off. Visitors then get the tracking page, the lobby TV and email, as they do now.

• The mobile network. turnda hands a text to the network. Whether it arrives, and how fast, is up to the network.
• The visitor’s phone. A phone that is off, out of range, full, or set to block unknown senders will not show the text.
• Replies. Visitors cannot reply to a text to ask a question. The only reply that works is STOP (and START to turn texts back on) in the countries where texts come from a phone number.
• Turning texts back on. The Turn them back on button on the stop page works from the link itself, in any browser, for 30 days after the stop; replying START always works too.
• A wrong number that the visitor confirms. If they confirm someone else’s number by mistake, that person gets the text.