How we ask before we text you

What this page is

This is the script. When the assistant on a call is about to cause a text message to that caller, it asks their permission first, in the words printed below, and then it stops talking and waits for an answer. Nothing on this page is a paraphrase of that. These are the lines as they are spoken, with the business's own name substituted where the square brackets are.

It is published so it can be checked. A caller who wants to know what they agreed to, or a carrier reviewing this messaging program, can read the question, both answers, and what happens either way — and then compare it against a recording of the call. There is no login, and nothing to download.

Consent is asked and given out loud, on a call the caller placed. There is no web form and no keyword to text in: saying yes to the question below is the only way anyone joins this program.

Who sends the messages, and who they go to

Every message we send names the business it comes from, first thing, before anything else in the text. That is the business whose number the caller dialled — the plumber, the electrician, the HVAC company. Wakeman is the software those businesses use to answer the phone, and it is never the sender.

Wakeman is named once on a call, in the recording disclosure at the start, because a caller should know a vendor is on the line. It appears in no text message a homeowner receives, and it is never given as the sender of one. The caller agreed to hear from their contractor.

A yes is given to one business and licenses that business only. It is recorded against that business's account and carries to no other business. A homeowner who agreed to a text from one plumber has agreed to nothing from another plumber who also uses Wakeman.

The recipient is always a number the caller themselves used: the number they said out loud on the call, or the number they dialled from. No number is bought, rented, appended from another source, or taken from a list.

A yes covers one handset — the number it was given for, which is written down with it. It does not travel to another number later in the same call. If the caller corrects their number after agreeing, nothing is sent to the new one: the appointment is theirs either way, the business has the corrected number, and the assistant does not tell them a text is coming. We would rather lose a message than send one to a phone nobody agreed for, because the number we were holding a moment earlier may not have been theirs at all.

How the question is asked

One ask per call. The first moment in a call where a text becomes genuinely useful is the only moment consent is asked. It is never asked twice, never rephrased for another try, and never re-asked because the answer was unclear. A caller who has been asked once has been asked.

The ask is a question, and then the assistant stops talking. It does not fill the silence and it does not answer its own question — anything it said into that gap would be a consent event it had manufactured for itself. It waits, through several seconds of silence if that is what happens.

The question is its own turn. It is never bolted onto the end of the sentence that confirms the appointment. Agreeing to the work and agreeing to a text are two different things, and the caller gets to answer them separately.

Where a business has no messaging configured — or where we do not hold the business's own name to put inside the question — there is no question at all. Asking permission for something the system cannot do is the same defect as promising it, and a question that cannot say who would be texting is not one a caller can answer or a reviewer can check.

Everything the caller needs to hear is inside the question: the name of the business that will be texting them, what the text will contain, that message and data rates may apply, and that they can reply STOP.

Path one — the text that confirms a booking

This is asked after the appointment is booked and the window has been read back, never before. A question standing between a satisfied caller and a filed job can cost them the job if they hang up on it, and losing a booking is a worse failure than losing a text.

If the caller says yes, the confirmation is sent, and the assistant says:

If the caller says no, nothing is sent, the booking stands exactly as it was, and the assistant says:

Path one, as a caller hears it

A whole exchange, with an example business name in place of the brackets. Ridgeline Plumbing is an illustration, not a customer.

And the same call where the caller declines. This is the branch that matters most, because it is the one that shows the text is optional rather than a condition of the booking:

No text is sent. The appointment is unchanged, and the caller is not asked again.

Path two — the link that confirms an address

The assistant checks the service address while the caller is still on the line. When it cannot place the address, a link the caller can tap and type into is a better tool than spelling a street name down a phone line. There are two moments where that comes up, and still only one question: whichever moment arrives first does the asking, and the other does not ask again.

The first is an address that came back unconfirmable:

On yes: “That's on its way — tap it, type your address, and the shop will take it from there.”

On no: “That's fine — let me take your details and have someone from the shop confirm it with you.” — or that same sentence opening “I'm having trouble placing that address —”, which is the wording the address check itself hands back. Nothing is sent on either, and a person confirms the address.

The second is two failed attempts to get the address by voice, which is where most callers meet the question, because a badly mangled address never reaches the checker at all:

On yes: “That's on its way — the shop will pick it up from there.”

On no: “I'm not getting that over the phone — let me take your number and have someone call you straight back to sort the address out.”

The rates and STOP sentence belongs to whichever of the two does the asking. It is said once per call, because there is only ever one ask.

Either answer produces the same thing for the caller: the details are written down, the business receives the lead, and a person follows it up. Neither branch tells anyone they are booked, because at that point they are not.

Path two, as a caller hears it

Again with an example name in place of the brackets.

And where the caller says no:

No text is sent. The details are taken down exactly as they would have been, and somebody from the business calls back.

Path three — the text that confirms a request is in

Some calls end with nothing to book on the spot: no window fits, the work is something the business does not do, or the caller needs a person for a price. The agent takes the details down and the shop calls back. The one text that can follow such a call confirms that the request was received — nothing more.

If the caller says yes, the note is sent, and the assistant says:

If the caller says no, nothing is sent and nothing else changes: the details are written down exactly as they would have been, and the shop calls back either way.

It is the same one ask as the other two paths. A call where the booking question or the address question has already been asked does not ask this one, and a call that asks this one asks nothing else.

Path three, as a caller hears it

Again with an example name in place of the brackets.

And where the caller says no:

No text is sent, and the callback happens regardless.

What counts as a yes

A word that means yes, spoken in answer to the question: yes, yeah, yep, yup, sure, okay, please, please do, go ahead, that works, that's fine, sounds good, send it, do that, absolutely.

A yes with a correction is still a yes. “Yes, but send it to my cell, five five five…” — the number the caller names in that answer becomes the recipient and the number on the record. The number they happened to call from does not. A number corrected afterwards, in a later turn, is a different case and is covered above: it becomes the number the business calls, and no text goes to it.

A caller who asks for a text without being asked — “can you just text me that?” — has consented, and it is recorded the same way, with their words in the record instead of ours.

Everything else is a no, and nothing is asked a second time to try to turn it into a yes. Silence, however long. A turn nobody could make out. A change of subject, or a late answer to some earlier question. A grunt, a hum, or the caller reading their own number back. And anything the assistant itself put into the gap, which is not an answer at all.

A question back is not an answer. A caller who asks “what link?” gets told — “it's just a form to type your address into, quicker than spelling it out” — and their reply to that is the answer. That is the only follow-up turn allowed here, and only because the caller asked for it.

Ambiguity resolves to no.

Saying no costs the caller nothing

There is no version of no in which the caller ends up worse off than if they had never been asked.

On a booking, the appointment stands. It is not held, re-confirmed, or made conditional on a text. On an address, the details are taken down exactly as they would have been, the business gets the lead, and a person calls back.

Agreeing to a text is not one of the terms of the service and is not bundled with them. Nothing the caller phoned about depends on it.

When a call ends before we can ask

Sometimes the line drops, or the caller hangs up mid-sentence, before the business has an address or a problem written down — and sometimes a call raises a safety concern and ends with no job on the books. In either case the business sends one message to the number that called it, about that call. If that number never reached us, nothing is sent, because there is nowhere to send it.

On most of these calls no consent question was asked, because the call ended before there was anything to ask about. We do not claim one. This is a single reply to an interrupted inbound call — the caller phoned this business about their own problem, was cut off, and the number is the one they dialled from. It is not an opt-in and is never treated as one: it adds the number to nothing, no second message follows it, and nothing about it starts a sequence.

Where the question did get put to them on that call, the answer is honoured. A caller who was asked and did not say yes — including the silences and the answers nobody could make out, which count as no above — is not sent this message at all. A caller who said yes is. So is a caller nobody managed to ask, which is very nearly all of them, and that is the plain truth of it: this is the one message on this page that is not waiting on a spoken yes, and the paragraph above should not be read as though every one of them had one behind it.

A no stops the message to the caller and stops nothing else. The shop is still told the call happened, and still gets whatever was said before the line went — that is an alert to the business's own staff about their own customer, not a message to the person who declined one.

It is not sent between 9pm and 8am in the business's local time; a message that wakes someone is not a recovery. The hour is checked at the moment the message is about to go out, not only when it is queued — so a message that was queued in daylight, ran into trouble at the carrier and came back to be tried again is checked afresh before every attempt, and held if it has crossed into the night. A call that ends inside those hours has its one message held until eight the next morning.

Where a business has never told us which timezone it is in, that promise is narrower, and we would rather say so than round it up. Those accounts sit on an assumed zone, and the message goes only between 11am and 6pm in it — a band that stays inside 8am to 9pm across every zone from Hawaii to the eastern seaboard, which is as far as the assumption can be wrong for a business in one of them. A message held overnight there waits for 11am rather than 8am. A business that sets its timezone gets the full window back, and gets the plain version of the promise above.

It names the business, and it says to reply STOP, which works exactly as it does on the other two.

The messages themselves, word for word

Four texts can follow a call from us, and no others. Square brackets mark the parts that change from one call to the next.

The booking confirmation, sent only where the caller said yes to the question in path one:

“[Business Name]: you're booked for [day and time]. [Service address] Reply here if anything changes, or STOP to opt out.”

The address link, sent only where the caller said yes to the question in path two:

“[Business Name]: thanks for calling. We couldn't confirm your address — tap to confirm it so the shop can review the request: [link] Reply STOP to opt out.”

The note that a request was received, sent only where the caller said yes to the question in path three:

“[Business Name]: got your request — the shop will call you back to sort out the details. Reply STOP to opt out.”

The one message after a call that ended before the job was captured. Which of the two is sent depends only on how the call ended:

“[Business Name]: sorry, we got cut off. Reply here with your address and what's going on, and we'll help the shop follow up. Reply STOP to opt out.”

“[Business Name]: we want to make sure we got this right. Reply here with your address and what's going on, and we'll help the shop follow up. Reply STOP to opt out.”

A business's own owner and on-call staff also receive operational alerts about their jobs, at numbers they entered in their own account. Those are internal to the business, are not part of this program, and never go to a homeowner.

One more thing can follow a yes, and it is not ours. Many of these businesses run their own job-management software — Housecall Pro or Jobber — and where they have connected it, a booked job is written into it. A yes is what sets the flags in that software that permit it to text the homeowner: Housecall Pro's customer notifications, Jobber's textable number, and the notify flag that goes with a moved appointment. So a caller who agreed may also hear from the contractor's own system about the same appointment — a changed time, or that system's own reminder. Those messages are sent by that software, from the business's own account, under the business's own carrier registration, and not by us.

A caller who said no, and a caller nobody asked, are written into that software as not to be texted. That is also what happens to most callers who said yes, and it is worth being exact about why: the customer record is created a turn before the question is put, so the answer usually arrives after it, and nothing we write afterwards edits that record. Our own confirmation text still reaches them; that software's texts to them stay off until the business turns them on. Where a business already had that customer on file, we change nothing about how they are messaged.

What a no does not switch off is the job itself, or anything that reaches the caller some other way. Jobber's appointment reminders are a setting about whether a client is reminded at all, not about texting, so we enrol every booked job in them exactly as we did before any of this and close the text channel instead — the number is marked not textable, so a homeowner who gave an email address and did not want texts still gets the reminder their contractor sends by email, and no reminder reaches their phone as a text. Declining a text is declining a text, and it is not a cancellation of the service the contractor sells.

What happens when you reply

Two of those messages ask you to reply, and one of them says the business will follow up on what you send. So it matters what actually happens to a reply, and this is it.

Your reply is received, stored, and passed to the business you called — the one named at the start of the message you are answering, and nobody else. It is put in front of them twice: in the dashboard their staff read, and as an alert to the phone of whoever is on call there. In the dashboard it sits on the record of the call it belongs to where we can tell which call that was, and as an entry of its own where we cannot — a text we cannot match to a call is still shown to that business, never discarded and never attached to a call it might not be about. That is the whole journey. It goes to the business whose customer you are, and to no other business, no advertiser and no list.

What we keep is what you sent: the words, the number you sent them from, the time, and any photo you attach — photos stay with the messaging carrier and are not republished by us. Nothing about a reply signs you up to anything, and a reply is not treated as agreement to be texted again.

Nothing answers you automatically. No text is sent back to you when you reply — not a confirmation, not an acknowledgement, not a menu. If someone gets in touch about what you sent, it is a person at the business, deciding to.

There is one exception, and it is the carrier's rather than ours: STOP, START and HELP are handled by the messaging platform itself, which sends its own standard reply. Those words are treated as instructions to that platform and are not passed to the business as messages from you. Everything else you write is, including a sentence that happens to contain one of those words.

Frequency, rates, and how to stop

Message frequency varies and depends on what happens with the job. Most callers receive one message. There is no schedule and no recurring send: each message is caused by one call and stops there.

Message and data rates may apply. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.

Reply STOP to any message to stop receiving them. STOP takes effect at the messaging platform that carries these texts, for that number, across every message that business sends — nothing here has to read the reply for it to work, and it would still work if this system were switched off. We do read it, and we write down that it happened, so the business has a record of it; that record is a consequence of the opt-out and never a condition of it. For help, write to info@wakeman.ai, where a person answers, or call the business back on the number you dialled. We do not claim an automatic answer to a HELP text: nothing in this system sends one.

A caller can also just say so on the phone, at any point in the call, including after they have said yes. A no on the call is a no: the record is changed to a no and from that moment nothing further is sent. What saying it cannot do is call back a message that has already gone — if the confirmation was queued in the seconds before, it is still delivered, and replying STOP is what stops anything after it.

What is written down when somebody answers

One record per call, written while the caller is still on the line by the same step that carries their answer, and saved in the same database transaction as the booking or the message it belongs to — so there is no instant in which a text is queued and the answer is not yet on file. It holds the time the answer that stands was given, the call it belongs to, the business it was given to, the number the message would go to where we have one, whether the answer was a yes or a no, the caller's own words as the assistant heard them when it caught them, and where the answer came from.

One case is written after the call instead, and it is worth being plain about because it is the only record on this page nobody spoke. If the assistant put the booking question and the call then ended with no answer of any kind recorded — the caller said nothing we could make out, or the line went, or the assistant simply closed the call without reporting what it heard — a no is written when the call is filed, against the number the question was about. That follows the rule printed above, where silence and anything unclear are a no; it can never overwrite an answer that was given, and it is never written for a caller nobody asked. The words field is left empty on those, which is how they can be told apart from a refusal we actually heard.

That record counts for everything a spoken no counts for, including holding back the dropped-call message described above. We would rather that message be lost to a caller who agreed and whose answer went unrecorded than sent to one who was asked and did not agree, and this is the only place on this page where the choice between those two falls to us instead of to them.

The question itself is not copied onto the record, and we would rather say so than list a field that does not exist. It does not vary: there is one script, it is printed above, and the only thing that changes from call to call is the business name filled into it. What varies is the answer, and the answer is what is kept. The recording and transcript of the call are where the question can be heard in the words that caller actually heard, and the record names that call.

One record, and only one. The database allows a single consent record per call, and it moves one way: a caller who says yes and then changes their mind has that record changed to a no, and nothing later in the call can turn a no back into a yes. The asymmetry is deliberate. A refusal is the answer we are most certain of, and asking again until somebody agrees is the practice this page exists to say we do not have — so a no ends the question for that call, while a yes can still be taken back. A call where nobody was asked has no record at all — there is no value meaning “we never asked”, because the absence of a record already says it.

For the two texts a caller is asked about, that record is the authority. Neither the booking confirmation nor the address link is sent unless it says yes — not because the system happens to be able to send texts, not because the call reached a point where a text would be useful, and not because a phone number came up at some point in the conversation. Being able to text someone is not permission to.

The same record decides what the business's own job-management software is told, where a business has connected one. The flags that let Housecall Pro or Jobber text that homeowner are set from this record and from nothing else: a yes turns them on, and a no or a never-asked leaves them off. The section above says what that means for the caller.

The third message — the one after a call that ended before the job was captured — reads the same record but obeys it differently, and the section above says how: it goes by default, and the record can only stop it. That is the one place on this page where a text is not waiting on a yes, and it is written there in full rather than left to be inferred from this sentence.

The call itself is recorded and transcribed, and the disclosure at the start of the call names the recording before any of this happens. How that is handled, and the exact words of the disclosure, are set out at wakeman.ai/legal/recording.

What this program is not

It is not marketing. No promotional message is sent to a homeowner by us — no offers, no prompts to book again, no seasonal anything. Wakeman answers inbound calls to a business's own published number, and businesses agree not to use it for outbound marketing calls or texts.

Nobody is added to a list of ours. There is no subscription to join, no recurring send and no sequence: each message we send is caused by one call and stops there. A yes does mark the caller's number textable in the business's own job-management software, where they run one and where the answer reached it in time, which is what lets that software's own reminders about that caller's job reach them by text — those are its messages, not ours, and the business can switch them off in it.

No mobile information is sold or rented. Mobile information and messaging consent are not shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Numbers and message contents go to the carrier that delivers the message, to the business whose customer it is, and to the job-management software that business runs where they have connected one. Nowhere else.

The rest of the picture is in two other documents: wakeman.ai/legal/privacy and wakeman.ai/legal/terms.