Message customers — Call for help & ticket chat

Customer communication adds two independent tools to a live ticket. You can turn on either one, both, or neither — per location.

• Call for help — a one-tap signal. The customer taps a button on their status page (for example to call a server); the ticket is flagged on your board until a team member acknowledges and attends.
• Two-way chat — short back-and-forth messages between the customer and your team, right on the ticket.

Both are great for seated or in-person service — restaurants, salons, waiting rooms, service counters, repair shops — and both are OFF until you turn them on.

Turn it on

First, SiteCheckin enables the feature for your business (it's a platform-level switch). Once that's on, locations you create start with Call for help and two-way chat already turned on (so it's there when you set up). Any location admin can change it here:

• Classic menus: Settings → Customer communication → Call for help & ticket chat.
• Queue screen: Set up → Customer updates, which opens the Customer updates tab of Settings.

The options:

• Enable "Call for help" — shows the call button on customers' live ticket pages.
• Enable two-way chat — lets the customer and your staff exchange messages on the ticket.
• Play a sound on the staff board when a new customer message arrives — an optional chime (chat only).
• Messages allowed per conversation — the per-ticket chat cap (default 30, up to 100). Blank uses the default. Raise it if your conversations run long.

Then select Save profile & check-in settings. To switch either feature off for a location, untick it in the same place and save. If you don't see Call for help & ticket chat in Settings at all, the feature isn't enabled for your business yet — contact SiteCheckin.

Configure Call for help

By default the customer sees a single generic "Request help" button. To offer specific choices, fill in Reasons customers can pick (comma-separated, up to 8) — for example a restaurant might use Call server, Water refill, Ready to order, Request the bill. Customers pick from your list; they never type free text, so there's nothing to moderate.

How Call for help works

1. The customer taps 🙋 Help on their status page and picks a reason. Their ticket turns red and blinks on your board.
2. Any team member clicks Acknowledge (on the board card or the ticket page — on My booth and Rooms, tap the 🙋 Needs help pill to open the ticket). The card turns blue, and the customer's page updates to "A team member has acknowledged your request — we'll attend to it shortly."
3. When you've handled it, click Mark attended to clear it. Moving the ticket to another stage does not clear the request — only Mark attended or closing the ticket does.

Call for help is available at any active stage and turns off once the ticket is closed.

Use two-way chat

Open a ticket — select Details on its card (on the board, My booth or Rooms), or click its 💬 shortcut. The ticket page has a 💬 Chat with customer panel — visually separate from your private Staff notes (which are marked 🔒 Internal and are never shown to the customer).

• Type in the chat box and click Send to customer. The message appears on the customer's page live.
• The first time you send on a ticket you're asked to confirm it goes to the customer (not an internal note). To skip that, tick "Don't ask me to confirm before sending (this device)" — remembered on that device.
• Sent something by mistake? Click the × on your message to retract it — it disappears from the customer's view (a copy is kept for your records).
• Messages are short (up to 200 characters). Tap 🙂 for a small row of emoji.

Message limits — what happens and how to raise them

Each ticket's chat has a cap on how many messages it can hold (both sides combined) — 30 by default. This is a safety limit; a normal quick-question chat rarely gets near it, and every new check-in starts fresh.

• Approaching the limit: when a conversation is within the last few messages, the note under the chat box shows how many are left (e.g. "3 messages left in this conversation").
• At the limit: the chat box is disabled on both sides.
  • The customer sees "Message limit reached for this visit."
  • Staff see either "A location admin can raise it in Settings → Customer communication" (if you're below the maximum) or, if you're already at the maximum of 100, "please reach out to SiteCheckin support."
• To allow more: a location admin raises Messages allowed per conversation in the same settings section (up to 100). Call for help is never limited — it's a signal, not a counted message, so it always works.

Spot new messages without opening every ticket

Every live ticket shows a small 💬 shortcut that opens its chat. When the customer has written, it turns into a blinking 💬 badge with a count. Click it to jump straight to that ticket's chat — opening the chat marks the messages read and clears the badge. You'll find it on:

• Board cards on the Dashboard / Queue. If you turned on the sound option, the board also chimes.
• My booth (or My window…, take-a-number locations) — on each ticket at your booth and in the waiting line.
• Rooms & equipment (Live → Rooms on the Queue screen) — on people using or waiting for a room (including the shared-QR line), plus a 💬 New messages list at the top naming who wrote. It updates live, no reload.

What the customer sees

At the top of their status page the customer gets a 💬 Message button. Tapping it opens a compact "Message the team" panel they can open and close; if you reply while it's closed, the button shows an unread count. If Call for help is on, a 🙋 Help button sits next to it with the reason(s) described above. See Tracking links & customer status.

Privacy & limits

• Staff notes are never sent to customers. Chat and internal notes are separate channels by design.
• Chat is bounded on purpose (short messages, a per-ticket cap) so it can't be misused.
• Message text is removed by the standard data-retention cleanup along with the rest of the ticket's details. See Plans & limits.