Messages in the worker app is your customers’ text conversations with the business, not a chat with the office. Customer texts come in to the business number, not to somebody’s personal phone, and the worker app carries those conversations so a crew member can answer a question from the driveway without handing out their own number.
Two limits worth knowing. A crew member only sees, and can only text, customers who have a job assigned to them, not your whole customer list. And customer texting comes with the Growing plan and up; Starter does not include it.
1 Open Messages
In the worker app, open Messages from the jobs screen. You get the list of customer conversations, most recent first.
An empty list says so plainly, noting that customer texts to the business appear here. If it stays empty, either nobody has texted or texting is not set up on the account yet. See how to text your customers.
2 Open a conversation
Tap a conversation to see its history. The screen is headed with the customer’s name, and the message box reads Type a message, with the send action labelled Text followed by the customer’s name so there is no doubt who it is going to.
A conversation with no history yet shows No messages yet.
Each outgoing message shows the first name of the person who sent it, or Auto-reply for a text AI replies sent by itself, so the crew can see what the office already told the customer.
When the owner has AI replies on Draft or Auto-send, the conversation also has a Draft reply button. It only fills the message box with a suggested answer from that customer’s records; nothing goes out until the crew member sends it. A reply Auto-send held back for a person shows with Use draft.
3 When a message will not send
If sending fails you get Could not send the message. Check your connection and try again.
Unlike job completions and photos, messages are not queued for later. If it fails, it did not go. Check the message actually appears in the thread before driving off, because a customer expecting a reply that never arrived is worse than one who was never answered.
Loading failures are equally explicit: Could not load conversations and Could not load messages, both of which mean signal rather than anything being wrong with the account.
Why this matters more than it looks
Two reasons this is worth insisting on with your crew:
Personal numbers are hard to take back. Once a customer has a crew member’s mobile, they use it forever, including after that person leaves. Then you have a customer texting a stranger about your business and you never see it.
The office cannot see what it cannot see. A conversation in the app is visible to you. A conversation on someone’s personal phone is invisible until it becomes a complaint. If a customer agrees a change of scope by text, you want that in the system.
What to tell your crew
Answer through the app, not your own phone. If a customer asks for something that costs money or changes the schedule, tell them the office will confirm, then flag it. Anything agreed in the app is on the record, which protects the crew as much as it protects you.