Staff alert texts

Texts suit anything urgent that everyone needs to see: cover needed for tonight, a burst pipe that's shut the kitchen, a change to tomorrow's start time. Staff don't need an app or a login, and a text works on any phone, including the old one somebody keeps in the van.

Keep routine rota chat wherever your team already has it. Save texts for the things that can't wait, and people will take them seriously when they arrive.

Add staff as contacts and group them into lists by site, team or role, such as bar staff, kitchen or on-call engineers. Then a campaign to 'Kitchen, Chester Road' reaches exactly the people who need it. CSV import brings in a staff list from your payroll or rota system in one go.

Shift requests usually go to a handful of people, so send them from Send SMS with the sender name left blank. They go from a UK mobile number and staff can reply. Replies land in the inbox, one thread per person, so you can see who said yes first and confirm with them directly.

If the alert starts in software, such as a monitoring tool spotting a freezer warming up or a rota system finding a gap, the API can send it. Your system calls POST /api/v1/messages with the on-call numbers, or a list_id, and the alert text. Use an Idempotency-Key for each alert so a system that retries doesn't text people twice about the same fault.

Subscribe to message.received and your system can read replies such as ACK and stop chasing. Delivery receipts tell you whether each person's phone got the text, which matters when you're relying on someone to turn up.

The parts of CaptiFi Connect that staff alerts use:

Texts to your own staff about work aren't marketing, so PECR's marketing rules don't come into it. Their numbers are still personal data under the UK GDPR, so tell staff you'll text them about work, keep the list up to date and take people off it when they leave.

Don't put anything in a staff alert you wouldn't want read on a lock screen, so no door codes, alarm codes or personal details about colleagues.

If a member of staff texts STOP, their number goes on your opt-out list and CaptiFi Connect won't text them again until they text START, so check with them before you rely on texts for their shifts. Alerts go to UK mobiles only.

Pubs, restaurants and hotels juggling shift cover, care providers, cleaning and security firms with staff spread over several sites, warehouses, and IT teams who want an alert that doesn't depend on email.