Phone Numbers, Calls and Text Messages

Overview

Rolling out. Phone numbers, text messages, the dialer and the call assistant become available once BestWebby's phone service is connected. Until then each of these screens says so, and nothing is queued.

One phone number powers three things in BestWebby:

• SMS marketing — text customers who agreed to receive texts, with STOP handled for you.
• The tele-sales dialer — click Dial and your own phone rings; answer it and you are connected to the lead.
• The call assistant — answers calls to your number, checks orders, takes messages and puts callers through to you. Every call lands in your inbox.

Until your store has a number, each of these says "Connect a phone number to use this". Nothing is queued or pretends to be sent in the meantime.

Who can use it. Phone numbers and SMS marketing are available from the Growth plan up. The dialer and the call assistant are Scale features. Only the account owner or an admin can buy or release a number and change call settings.

Step 1: Get a number

Go to Settings → Phone numbers.

1. Choose the country (United States or Canada) and Local or Toll-free. For a local number, type the area code you want.
2. Click Search. Each number shows its monthly list price.
3. Click Choose on the one you like. You see the price again, and nothing is bought until you click Add number.

The number works for calls and texts straight away. Callers and customers see it as your store's number.

Keep a number you already have. A number you own can be moved ("ported") to your store instead of buying a new one. Porting is done by the carriers and usually takes one to four weeks. Contact support (Help → Support, "Guidance") with the number, the account holder's name and service address exactly as on your current bill, your account number and port-out PIN, and a recent bill. Do not cancel your current service before the move is finished.

Pricing and usage

Pricing for numbers, calls and texts is published in Settings → Phone numbers when the phone service is connected, and that screen shows what your store has used. Minutes count every leg of a call, each rounded up to the whole minute, as carriers bill them: a dialer call uses two legs (your phone and the lead's). A text of up to 160 plain characters is one segment; longer texts, or texts with emoji or some accented letters, use more.

Text messages (SMS)

Go to Marketing → SMS. The banner shows the number texts are sent from and how many segments you have used.

• Who receives them. Campaigns go only to customers who agreed to receive texts from your store. Agreeing to marketing email does not count.
• How shoppers agree. Shoppers tick Text me offers (optional, never ticked for them) at checkout, in your sign-up pop-up, or under Texts about offers on their account page. The box appears only when your store has a number that can text. Ticking it does not subscribe anyone, because anyone can type anyone's number: we text that number once asking for a YES, and the shopper is subscribed only when that number replies YES (or START, or OUI) within 24 hours. The confirmation text waits for the shopper's daytime like a marketing text, is paid from your credit, and is not sent to a number that already agrees, texted STOP, or already has one waiting. A STOP before the YES cancels it. Shoppers can stop the texts from their account page at any time.
• What is kept as proof. Each consent keeps its evidence: how it was given, when, the exact sentence the shopper saw and its version, when they ticked the box, their IP address and browser, and the reply that confirmed it. A customer who texts START after a STOP is subscribed again with that text as the evidence.
• Recording a consent yourself. On the Opt-outs tab, enter the number, choose how the customer agreed (in person, on a paper form or on a phone call) and the date, and click Opt back in. Your name is recorded with it, and without how and when nothing is recorded. The number must already belong to a customer.
• Consents tab. Consents lists every customer who agrees to texts and how they agreed. Consents recorded before this evidence was kept say No evidence recorded: they still get your texts. Click Record evidence to say how and when the customer agreed, or opt the number out.
• Audience. Under Audience, pick one of your saved segments, shown with how many customers it held when it was last counted, or All customers who agreed to texts. Create segments in Customers → Segments. Only members who agreed to texts and have a phone number on file are messaged, so a send can reach fewer people than the segment's count.
• Quiet hours. Marketing texts (broadcasts, flow texts, an offer sent from a customer's profile) go out only within your Calling rules hours in the customer's own time zone, worked out from their area code (or your store's time zone when the area code does not say). A broadcast sent in the evening is queued at once, and the texts for customers where it is already late wait until morning there; the result says how many are waiting. Order updates and replies are never held.
• Large broadcasts and progress. Queue campaign saves the audience first, one entry per phone number (two customers who share a number get one text), then queues the texts a batch at a time. Each customer is checked again when their turn comes: anyone who has texted STOP or no longer agrees to texts by then is skipped, and quiet hours are worked out at that moment. The button answers within seconds, however large the audience. Broadcasts, below the composer, shows each broadcast: how many texts are queued, how many are waiting for daytime, how many were skipped and why, and how many could not be sent. It refreshes on its own while a broadcast is sending.
• When a broadcast stops. If your Phone & SMS credit runs out, or your number, plan or store contact details stop it, the broadcast stops with the reason, the texts not sent yet wait, and you get a notification (An SMS broadcast stopped part-way in Settings → Notifications). Fix the cause and click Resume: it carries on from where it stopped. Cancel stops a broadcast, including texts still waiting for daytime. If BestWebby restarts in the middle of a broadcast, it carries on by itself within a few minutes, and nobody is texted twice. A broadcast that has not moved for 20 minutes is marked Stuck in red, you are notified, and the BestWebby team is alerted.
• STOP, START and HELP. Marketing texts end with "Reply STOP to opt out". A customer who replies STOP (or UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT) gets one confirmation and then nothing further from your number — not even order updates — until they text START. You cannot opt them back in from the dashboard; only they can. HELP replies with your store name and number.
• Links. Every link is tracked, so clicks show on Marketing → Deliverability. A link to your own store also carries the broadcast's tag (utm_campaign, with utm_medium=sms and utm_source=text), so an order placed after a click counts as the broadcast's revenue. The tag adds about 80 characters to each such link, which can make a text one segment longer. Links to other sites go out as you wrote them, and a link that already has your own utm_campaign keeps it.
• Replies. Any other text a customer sends appears in your Inbox, one conversation per phone number.
• Where texts can go. US and Canadian numbers only.

The dialer

In Dialer, pick a campaign and load the next lead. Calling hours in the lead's time zone, consent and do-not-call lists are checked before the lead is shown and again when you click Dial. A purchased or public list is not consent: those leads are called only after their number is checked against your National Do Not Call List download (see Sales OS).

1. Make sure your rep profile has your phone number — that is the phone that rings. A sales admin sets it in Sales console → Reps (the phone column when importing reps). It must be a US or Canadian number.
2. Tick the box under the recording notice to confirm you will read it to the person, then click Dial (it stays locked until you do). Your phone rings within a few seconds, showing your store's number.
3. Answer it. The lead is called and you are connected when they pick up. Use Hang up in the dialer, or hang up your phone.
4. Choose the outcome (Interested, Callback, Do not call and so on) to move to the next lead.

If the call cannot be placed (no number yet, no phone on your profile, calling not available on your account right now, another call still live) the dialer says why. The call is still logged, so you can record the outcome of a call you made another way.

Recording. Turn on Record tele-sales calls in Settings → Phone numbers. A call is recorded only when the rep confirmed the recording notice, and the person called hears the notice before they are connected. Recordings are kept in your store's private storage, included when you download your media archive, and deleted with your account.

The call assistant

Go to Channels → Call assistant and turn on Answer calls with the assistant. The switch turns on only when your plan includes the call assistant (Scale) and your store has a phone number. Until then the page lists what is missing, each with a link to fix it. Only the account owner or an admin can turn the assistant on or off, and each change is recorded in the audit log.

• Greeting. What callers hear first. The assistant then tells them it is an automated assistant and that the call is transcribed.
• Questions. It answers general questions in short spoken replies and never makes up prices, stock, hours or policies it was not given — it says it will pass the question on.
• Orders. A caller can ask about an order by reading out the order number from their confirmation email. The status is read out only if they are calling from the phone number on that order, and only the status and carrier — never the address or total.
• A person. A caller who asks for someone is put through to the phone you set in Settings → Phone numbers → Put callers through to. If nobody answers, or no phone is set, they can leave a voicemail.
• Afterwards. Each call becomes a ticket in your Inbox with what was said and a short summary. Voicemails can be played from Call assistant → Recent calls.
• Try it first. "Test the assistant" shows exactly what a caller would hear, without placing a call.

With the assistant off, calls go straight to your forwarding phone, or to voicemail.

Outbound automated calls

The call assistant above answers calls that come in. Channels → Call assistant also has a separate switch, "Turn on automated calling for this store", for calls BestWebby places automatically on your behalf. Off by default — turning it on needs a phone number first, the same one the rest of this page covers.

Three kinds of calls, each its own switch under the main one:

Consent is separate from everything else. A customer must have explicitly agreed to receive an automated call — this is its own consent, distinct from email or SMS marketing consent, and nothing else implies it. There are two of them:

• Order follow-ups and appointment reminders run on the consent you can record on the customer's CRM profile. It is stored as your statement that they agreed.
• Win-back calls are sales calls, so they need the customer's own agreement, given from their account on your store under Calls about offers. You can't record it for them, but you can withdraw it from their CRM profile if they ask you to stop. A customer who has only the first consent is never sent a win-back call.

Every call is re-checked right before it goes out, not just when it was first scheduled — a customer can withdraw consent, or you can turn the feature off, in between: the customer must still be consented and off any Do-Not-Call list, within the store's allowed calling hours, and the feature (and that specific reason) must still be turned on.

A call that fails any of these never goes out, and never pretends to. Call assistant → Outbound call history shows every one that was placed or refused, with the plain-language reason for a refusal.

Good to know

• Card numbers read out on a call are removed from the stored transcript.
• A single call is limited to one hour.
• Releasing a number stops calls and texts to it reaching your store. You may not be able to get the same number back.