Email and SMS

SMS interrupts, email documents. Use SMS for Danger and email for everything else, and remember a channel needs the contact detail behind it.

The two channels do different jobs and the difference is worth respecting when you configure a role.

SMS interrupts. It reaches someone on a shop floor who isn't looking at email. Reserve it for levels that genuinely warrant interrupting a shift.
Email documents. It carries more detail, threads, and is easy to search later.

A common and sound configuration: email at Extreme Caution and above, SMS at Danger only. Everyone stays informed and nobody's phone becomes background noise.

Enabling a channel without the contact detail behind it subscribes someone to nothing — SMS with no phone number is the usual case. It fails silently, so Readiness looks for it specifically.

Before a number receives its first text, somebody has to agree to it. Two ways, and the choice is on the store's contact form. “Ask them to confirm” emails the person a one-tap link — they confirm their own number, which is the strongest record and the default. “I’ve told them” records that you informed them yourself, which is for a kitchen phone with no inbox behind it. Either way the contact is alerted from the moment you add them: this is record-keeping, not coverage, and nobody goes unwarned while paperwork is outstanding.

Anyone with a login enters their own mobile on their profile page and is recorded as having confirmed it. Store contacts who never sign in use the emailed link. On a store’s contact list each number shows Confirmed, You vouched, Not confirmed or Opted out, and Readiness lists the ones still outstanding — so a list imported months ago can be worked through rather than guessed at.

If somebody replies STOP, that is final. No further text reaches them, only they can reverse it by texting START, and you cannot re-enable it for them. If they were a store’s only text contact, that store now depends on email alone — Readiness flags it as critical for exactly that reason.

SMS is included from Pro upward. It applies to every text the system sends about an alert — the unit's own contact, every store manager, everyone in a territory, and the escalation chain — so a plan that includes SMS includes it on all of them, and a plan that doesn't gets email everywhere instead.

A phone number needs the full number including the area code — (614) 555-1234, not 555-1234. Type it however you like: brackets, dashes, dots and spaces are all fine, and so is a leading +1. We store it in the international form the network needs. An extension is dropped, because a text cannot dial one. A number saved without an area code cannot be texted at all, so it is reported on Readiness rather than quietly skipped — including on an escalation, where silence is most costly.

A number with no area code cannot receive a text at all, and there is nothing sensible to guess — so it is refused rather than sent somewhere. Readiness lists any number in that state, because the person it belongs to believes they are covered.

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