# When a customer texts your receptionist number
Source: https://help.mucka.ai/ai/when-a-customer-texts-your-number
Category: Mucka AI
Last updated: 2026-09-23
> Your receptionist answers texts as well as calls. Here is what your customer gets, what you are told, how it is charged, and how to switch it off.
Your receptionist number is a **mobile number**, and it is the number on every text Mucka sends your customers. So sooner or later somebody texts it back instead of ringing.
Since 14 September 2026, your receptionist **answers them**.
## The short version
**It replies properly.** Same receptionist, same rules, same things it can do on the phone: answer a question about your business, take a message, get an address right, look up a booking, or pencil a visit in for you to approve.
**Nothing is settled without you.** A booking it takes by text is pencilled in and waits in your Actions exactly as a phone one does. It never confirms anything as done.
**You are still told.** The message goes on that customer's record, a card lands in your Actions, and you get a push and a WhatsApp with what they said and their number.
**Is it on for you?** Check **Receptionist → Settings → Who hears about it → Answer texts as well as calls**. Accounts set up since 14 September 2026 have it on to start with. Accounts that were already running when it landed have it **off**, so that nothing changed on anybody's number overnight without them knowing. Same switch either way.
## What your customer gets
A proper reply, usually within a few seconds.
The first message it sends in a conversation says plainly that it is the automated assistant for your business. On the phone a recorded notice plays before it speaks; a text has nothing like that, so it says so itself. After that it just gets on with helping, and it does not mention it again.
It writes short, one point at a time, the way somebody in the office would tap it out. No links, ever — the mobile networks quietly filter texts with web addresses in them, so a message with a link is a message nobody receives.
If they ask whether they are talking to a person, it tells them the truth. That one has no exceptions.
## What you get
Three things, whether the text arrives at nine in the morning or nine at night:
**On the customer's record.** Open the client and the whole conversation is in the timeline, in order, both sides of it. That is the durable copy — cards get dismissed, records do not.
**A card in [Actions](/actions)** the first time they write in, saying who texted, what they said, and that the receptionist is replying. One card per conversation, not one per message.
**A push and a WhatsApp** with the message and their number, so you can ring straight off the notification if you would rather take it yourself.
If the conversation turns into something — a message to pass on, a booking, a change to an appointment — that raises its own card, and you are not told twice about the same conversation.
**A summary at the end.** A text conversation has no hang-up, so it closes when the customer has been quiet for two hours. That is when the summary lands, if you have "tell me about every call" switched on.
Arrive out of hours and the push and WhatsApp are held until the morning rather than binned. A text at 11pm about a leak is still worth reading over breakfast.
## What it costs
Texts have their **own allowance**, separate from your voice minutes. A call has a beginning and an end and costs its length; a text conversation can run all afternoon in bursts, so pricing one like the other would price the wrong thing.
Your business gets **60 free texts a month** — the same 60 however many of you there are, just like your 60 free minutes. After that they come out of a bundle you buy the same way you buy minutes, and you can set it to top itself up. Both use the same card. From 1 October it's also the same allowance your booking confirmations, reminders and on-my-way texts come out of — one balance for every text Mucka sends your customers, shown on [**Settings → Customers → Automatic messages**](/settings/customers/customer-messages) as well as here.
Your balance is on the same row as the switch: **Receptionist → Settings → Who hears about it → Answer texts as well as calls**.
If you run out, the receptionist finishes off any conversation it is in the middle of and stops starting new ones. It does not go quiet: a customer who texts then gets the short reply below instead, and you are still told.
## When it does not answer
There are a few reasons it will pass a message on rather than reply to it: you have switched it off, the allowance is spent, the number has asked us to stop texting them, or something went wrong at our end.
In every one of those cases the customer gets the same short text back — that their message has been passed to the team, and to ring the number if it is urgent — and you get the card and the notification. **Nobody is ever left with silence.** A customer who texts a business and gets nothing at all cannot tell that from being ignored.
It also will not answer a message that is plainly from a machine (a delivery notification, an out-of-office). Two automatic systems replying to each other costs real money and helps nobody.
## What it will not do
- **It will not let you reply from the WhatsApp.** We do not put words in your mouth to your own customer. Ring them, or text them yourself from the client record.
- **It will not chase them.** If they go quiet, that is the end of it — no follow-up asking whether they got your message.
- **It will not send anything with a link in it**, because the networks filter those.
- **It does not read texts on your own mobile.** This is only the Mucka receptionist number.
Somebody texting **STOP** is handled separately and always has been: they are opted out immediately, no card is raised, and no AI sees the message. An opt-out is an instruction, not a conversation.
## If the number is not one of your customers
It still answers, and it is told in the strongest terms that it has no history with them at all — no address, no past jobs, nothing. It asks for what it needs as though it is the first time, because it is.
You still get the card, quoting the number instead of a name. Somebody texting your business out of the blue is a lead.