Changing pickup time from Square POS - Customers don't get alerted?

[scottiespizza]

We are doing our best to use order scheduling and order limiting in a way that sets us up to be operating at max capacity for the full 4 or 5 hours that we're open each day. To do this, we often adjust the pickup times for orders, so that we fully book our day with the maximum amount of pizzas we can make.

But we frequently get complaints from customers and find ourselves in difficult situations when someone shows up at the original pickup time they were given, only to find out on-the-spot that their order was rescheduled for 30 minutes (or 45 minutes, or an hour+) later, because they didn't receive an update that their pickup time would be different. Lately we've resorted to calling customers when we adjust their pickup time, but this can take up a lot of our time each day–sometimes a full hour or more on the phone and POS, organizing, rescheduling and calling customers for orders that are placed in the morning before we open.

We are definitely not ruling out user-error/ignorance on the customer's end, but we just want to know exactly what gets sent to them so that we can put a notice in the form of a pop-up or a message in the header of our online store that lets people know to check their email/text for a message from ____ that says ____ in the likely event that we need to adjust their order pickup time.

Can someone provide details on what kind of message goes out from Square when we change the pickup time in the POS? Is it a text message, or an email? And what does it say? And is anyone else having trouble like this?

[Seamus · Accepted solution]

Hey @scottiespizza,

Sorry to hear you're having trouble with order change alerts!

I'd say that customers are probably missing the notification here unfortunately, which may be more likely to happen if there's a short turnaround time on orders.

I ran a test and the SMS looks like this:

Note that the date here is in Australian format so it'll appear as 01/08/2021 in the US, and it should say "Order Alert from: Your Business Name" there (the test account I used has a blank name).

If your order times are likely to change, the best you can probably do is let customers know to keep an eye out, or as you've been doing, give them a call. It definitely sounds frustrating though!

[scottiespizza]

Ok, so just yesterday we had another customer show up at the original time they scheduled their order for (6pm). When we received the order (hours earlier) we had to change the pickup time to be 15 mins later because we were already maxed out at that time. He was confused when we told him his pickup time, and said he never got a notification. We said (more confidently than usual since the last reply to my initial post) “you were sent a text message that said your pickup time was changed.” He was a little upset but stepped back and waited 15 mins for his order to be ready. 15 mins later he came back to the door to pick up his pizza and said “Just to let you know I double checked and there was no text message about the pickup time for my order.” He said in fact that he never got any texts- not even an initial confirmation.

So... what’s happening here? Did he type his phone number in wrong? This happens too often for that to be the case every time. Is there any way for us to confirm that a message was sent after when change the pickup time? Because now we’re always worried when we do it, but we need to adjust times in order for our business to flow properly. 

[AdamB]

Jumping in for @Seamus here, @scottiespizza.

I agree with you that while some customers may input a wrong phone number, it's not likely to be the cause of every case of a customer not seeing changes to their pickup time. In the case of the gentleman in your previous post, my guess is he didn't check the option to receive text notifications about his order. Normally if there's an issue with notifications failing or being delayed, we will update our status page to reflect that outage. I'd recommend subscribing to that for updates, that way if something does happen you'll know in advance so you can notify customers separately.

[scottiespizza]

Circling back to this question because we have had many similar cases since the last reply. We've tested it by asking our friends to let us know, and by asking customers as well if they received a text update that the time was updated.

The above reply says that people have to 'opt in' to receiving sms updates, but on the checkout page of our store it says: "By providing your phone number, you agree to receive text messages related to your order. Standard message rates may apply. Reply STOP to opt out of receiving any future text messages related to your order." This is also not happening on short turnaround times, but more often when someone schedules an order an hour ahead and we need to push it back to an hour and a half, for example. 

I am certain that not every case of a missed sms update is the result of a typo, or someone opting out, or replying 'STOP'. There has to be a glitch. And it is still leading to difficult confrontations with customers. We have language in multiple places of our square site instructing customers to be aware that we may need to change their time, and to look out for SMS alerts, so I feel we're doing all we can on our end but it's not working on the Square end.

Sadly we've resorted to calling customers to let them know what their updated pickup time is, since we can't rely on the 'change pickup time' feature, but that creates more work for us and also defeats the purpose of ordering online when we end up having a phone conversation anyway.

Help?

[Amanda_Bierock]

Hi, was curious if you found any resolution on this? I have never relied on this feature for the very reasons you outlined, although it would be nice during our busy times to use this!

[AshleyK]

@Amanda_Bierock Thanks for reaching out! If your customers are not getting notified about pickup times, then make sure they are checking the option to receive text notifications about their order. 

[EarthMarket]

We are having the same issue and it is causing a lot of problems for us. Customers aren't getting our updated time pickup and showing up to get their items based on the confirmation that was sent to them---even though its not the correct date or time.

Very frustrated and feel bad for customers making a trip to us thinking their order is ready.

Please fix this. It should send out an email not a text message... When we mark orders as ready it emails the customer so this should be no different??

[scottiespizza]

This feature is still failing very often.

We've had to put so many disclaimers on our online store about how Square works and it still messes up people's day when they show up expecting their order to be ready and then are told they have to wait another 20 minutes and "didn't you get a text?" is a terrible thing to ask an already frustrated customer.

We've resorted to calling people every time we have to adjust their pickup time, which is just creating more work on our end and also defeating the purpose of them ordering online.

I've even experienced this myself ordering from other places with Square online stores. Most of the time I don't even see a checkbox but whenever I do, I check the box, put the order through, and sometimes I get allllll the text updates (order accepted, order in progress, order ready, etc) and sometimes I get nothing.

I agree that it should be an email update (or both).

[scottiespizza]

Coming back many months later to report that my customers are still not receiving text updates that their order pickup time has been changed. On Saturday a customer showed up at 6:15pm and we had changed their pickup time to 6:45pm. We told them that they should have received a text update. They showed us their texts and we could see that they received a confirmation text when they initially placed the order, with 6:15 quoted, but no further updates.

We rely on this feature heavily, and have a lot of language on our website informing folks to make sure they are 'opted in' to receiving text updates and to expect a change in their pickup time when placing orders during peak hours. But it still has not been working a lot of the time! 

One huge thing that would make it less of a big deal to have this text feature functioning properly is if we could more specifically limit order timing, by number of items/category per 15 minutes, and also restricting to just be "on the 15" like 5pm, 5:15pm, 5:30pm, 5:45pm, etc. I'll open a separate thread to ask about this feature.