Notifications and escalation
What happens after your team posts an update: push first, then an email with a fresh link, then a staff follow-up if it is still unread.
The problem this solves
An update the customer never sees is the same as an update you never sent. Customer Rooms therefore does not stop at "message delivered" — it escalates until either the customer has seen it or a named person on your team knows they have not.
The ladder
When your team posts a customer-visible update:
| Step | What happens | When |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Stop everything if the customer has already viewed the update | Immediately, and re-checked at every later step |
| 1 | Send a push notification to the customer's room app | Immediately, if they enabled notifications |
| 2 | Send an email carrying a fresh link back to the room | After the configured wait, if still unread and an email is on file |
| 3 | Create a follow-up for your team, synchronized to Boni Tasks | After the second configured wait, if still unread |
The default waits are around half an hour before the email step and around four hours before the staff follow-up. Your configuration may differ.
If there is no email on file, no owner, or an external step is uncertain, the ladder deliberately ends in a staff follow-up rather than retrying silently. Somebody is always left holding the outcome.
Delivery and read state
Because there is no external messaging provider behind a room, Bow Chat can be precise about what the ticks mean:
| State | Means |
|---|---|
| Sent | Stored and available in the room |
| Delivered | Rendered by the customer's authenticated room app |
| Read | Seen while the customer had the chat open |
Opening the room's details alone never marks a message read. Only the messages actually rendered on screen are marked.
Getting push notifications working
Push is the fastest step, and it is the one most often left off. Three things must all be true:
- The customer opened the room in a supported browser or installed app.
- The customer tapped Enable notifications in the room.
- The browser permission prompt was granted.
Installing the app alone does not create a subscription. The room shows a visible notifications-off state with an action to turn them on, and says plainly when the browser itself has blocked notifications so the customer knows to change it in browser settings.
When a customer enables notifications, the latest unread update is retried immediately. Anything already read is not re-sent.
Practical guidance for teams
- Ask the customer to enable notifications during the first interaction, while they are already in the room. Retrofitting it later is much harder.
- Keep the customer's email accurate. It is the only fallback between push and a human chasing them.
- Treat a step-3 follow-up as a real signal. Repeated follow-ups on the same customer usually mean notifications were never enabled, not that the customer is ignoring you.
- Do not repost the same update into WhatsApp as a habit. That trains customers to stop opening the room, which removes the reason to have one.
What does not happen
- The same email is not sent twice because a job retried. Each step claims its event before doing anything external.
- A message the customer already read is never escalated.
- An escalation failure cannot break the customer's room. Receipt and notification problems are handled separately from the message timeline.