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A missed call is a customer who wanted you and got nothing. Liftify can text them back from the number they dialled, within seconds, so the conversation carries on by text instead of ending in silence. Their reply lands in your Inbox like any other message. This is set per location, and the location needs a dedicated Liftify number.

Turn it on for a location

  1. Click Locations in the left sidebar, then Edit on the location’s card — or open the location and click Edit location.
  2. On the Location Details tab, scroll to Call Forwarding Number.
  3. Switch on Text missed callers back.
  4. Optionally write your own wording in Missed-call text — see Write the text.
  5. Click Save Changes.
The switch describes itself on the form: “When a call to this location’s dedicated number goes unanswered, text the caller from that number. A caller is texted at most once every 10 minutes, and contacts who opted out of texts are never texted.”
This needs a dedicated number. The switch only appears on a location that has a Liftify number of its own — the same condition as Call Forwarding Number, which it sits beneath. On a location sharing a number with your other locations you get the note “Call forwarding requires a dedicated number.” instead of either control, because a reply from a shared number could not tell the customer which of your businesses was writing.If you turn the switch on and the location’s number has since been given to another location as well, the save is refused with “requires a dedicated (exclusively assigned) number”. Contact Liftify support if you want a dedicated number for a location.

What counts as a missed call

Two things count, and nothing else:
  • The location has no forwarding number, so there was never anywhere for the call to ring. The text goes out as soon as the call arrives.
  • The call was forwarded and nobody picked up — the forwarded line rang out, was busy, or the call failed or was cancelled.
A call that was answered gets no text. That includes a call answered by the forwarded line’s own voicemail: the phone network tells Liftify the call was answered and cannot say by what, so a customer who left you a voicemail is not also texted.

Write the text

Missed-call text is the message that goes out. Leave it blank and Liftify sends the wording shown in the box as a placeholder:
Hi, this is {{location_name}}. Sorry we missed your call! Reply to this text and we’ll get right back to you.
Write your own and it replaces that for this location. You have the usual text message allowance of 1,000 characters. Merge tags work here, and the form says which details they use: “Merge tags such as {{location_name}} and {{location_phone_number}} use this location’s details. Leave blank to send the default shown.”
Say who you are and ask for a reply. The whole point is to turn the missed call into a text conversation, so a message that only apologises leaves the customer with nothing to do. Naming the location matters too — the text arrives from a number the customer dialled once and may not recognise.
A few things to know about merge tags in this particular message:
  • {{location_phone_number}} and {{account_phone_number}} fall back to the number the caller dialled when you have not filled that field in, rather than printing nothing useful.
  • {{customer_first_name}} comes out blank for a caller Liftify has never seen before, so write the message to read properly without a name — “Hi, this is …” rather than “Hi {{customer_first_name}}, …”.

What happens in the Inbox

The call is recorded on the customer’s thread first and the text follows it, so the thread reads in the order things actually happened: the call came in, then you wrote. The outgoing text carries a Missed-call text badge beside its timestamp. Automated messages otherwise read only as System, so the badge is there to stop anyone on your team assuming a colleague had already picked the thread up. If the caller is not in Liftify yet, a contact is created for them from their phone number, named Caller until somebody renames it, and the text goes to that contact. Without one, their reply would land in the unknown-sender holding area rather than in the Inbox — which would defeat the point. Contacts created this way are marked as having come from a missed call, so you can tell them apart from the ones your office added.

When the text is held back

Liftify checks all of these before it writes, and silently skips the text if any of them says no:
Your sending days and hours do not apply. This is a reply to contact the customer made seconds ago, the same as the automatic reply to an inbound text, so it goes out when the call comes in — including in the evening and at the weekend. If you do not want a location answering calls out of hours this way, switch it off for that location.
Nothing here overrides a “no”. A customer who replied STOP, one your connected system flags as do-not-text, and one you have unsubscribed are all left alone, as they are everywhere else in Liftify.

Troubleshooting

I turned it on and nothing was texted. Work down the table above. The two most common answers are that the call was actually answered — by a person or by the forwarded line’s voicemail — and that the caller withheld their number. The text went to a contact called “Caller”. That is a caller who was not in Liftify yet. Open the contact and give them a real name; the next text to them will use it. The switch isn’t on the Edit Location form. The location does not have a dedicated number, so neither this nor Call Forwarding Number is offered. See Set up your locations. A customer got the text twice. They should not: a caller is texted at most once every 10 minutes, however many times they redial. If you have a genuine duplicate, contact Liftify support with the customer’s number and roughly when it happened.