Reference
Glossary
Every term this documentation uses, and where it is explained properly.
Terms
- Account view
- The dashboard mode covering every branch at once — overview, locations, customers, QR codes, analytics, reports, marketing, team and account settings.
- Add-on
- Something bought on top of your plan, such as a voice call pack. It renews with your subscription and appears on the same invoice.
- Alert
- The bell on a waitlist visit. It sends the customer the “it’s your turn” message without moving them; moving somebody to Serving sends nothing.
- Allowance
- The monthly pool of texts and WhatsApp messages your plan includes. Push notifications and emails do not draw on it, and calls come from a voice call pack instead.
- Appointment
- A visit with a time attached, made through your booking page or by your team. Also called a booking.
- Blocked number
- A number that cannot join or book online and gets no messages from you, at one location or all of them. It does not affect any other business on Queue Join.
- Buffer
- Extra time after a service, before the next booking can start. Blocks your diary without appearing to the customer as part of their appointment.
- Called
- The state a visit moves into when staff start serving somebody. Labelled Serving in the dashboard. The message that it is their turn is sent separately, by the Alert bell (or by moving a visit to called through the API).
- Category
- A grouping for services or resources. Service categories help customers choose; resource categories help you organise.
- Customer
- A person, held once for your whole business rather than per branch, with their whole history attached.
- Fallback
- The backup that goes only when the first message did not do the job: a text sent if the WhatsApp did not land and the customer has not seen the alert, and a delayed call placed if they still have not.
- Location
- One physical branch, with its own address, time zone, opening hours, queues and settings.
- Location view
- The dashboard mode for a single branch — its waitlist, appointments, customers and settings.
- Mark as fake
- Removes an entry that is not a real person. It is cancelled without a message and does not count towards your plan’s visits.
- Merge tag
- A placeholder in a message — the customer’s name, their position, a link — replaced with real values when it is sent.
- No-show
- Somebody who was called and never appeared. Recorded separately from served so the rate is a number you can act on.
- Not sent
- What a visit’s message history shows when Queue Join held a message back, with the reason — an opt-out, a blocked number or a limit reached, for example.
- Opt-out
- A customer replying STOP, which stops every message to them from every business on Queue Join, including their own visit updates, until they reply START. Unsubscribing from an email does the same for email. Different from withdrawing marketing consent.
- Organisation
- Your business. Owns the plan, the team, the customers, the services and every location.
- Overage
- What pays, on a paid plan with it switched on, for messages past your allowance and calls past your voice call pack: one balance, topped up automatically up to a monthly cap you set.
- Position
- Where somebody is in the queue, counted from the front. Position one is next.
- Queue
- One line customers join, belonging to a branch. Most locations need exactly one.
- RCS
- A richer kind of text message. Texts from the UK number try RCS first and fall back to plain SMS on phones that cannot take it; texts to US and Canadian numbers are plain SMS. Counts as a text.
- Registration type
- Whether something applies to waitlist visits, bookings or both. Services, fields and messages all carry one.
- Resource
- Whatever does the work — a person, chair, room, bay or machine. Resources prevent double-booking and set your throughput.
- Role
- A named set of permissions. Owner, Admin, Location manager, Editor, Staff and Reader come as standard, and you can create your own.
- Security check
- A quick are-you-human check on the join or booking page, asked for only when many attempts come from one connection or during unusual activity.
- Sender number
- The phone number your texts and calls come from, chosen by the country of the customer’s number.
- Served
- A visit that has been dealt with. One of the three endings, along with no-show and cancelled, and the only one you can undo — drag it back on the board.
- Service
- One thing a customer can ask for, with a duration. Durations are what make wait estimates and bookable slots real.
- Short name
- The word identifying your business in every public link. Changing it breaks anything already printed.
- Slot
- A bookable time, generated from a service’s duration, your opening hours and what your resources have free.
- Status page
- The customer’s own page showing their position and estimated wait, reached by an unguessable link.
- Survey
- Questions you ask visitors after their visit, sent about five minutes after it ends and shown on their status page. You write one for the whole business and switch it on per location, for waitlist visits, bookings or both.
- Test number
- Your own phone, verified with a code, so testing your waitlist again and again is not mistaken for misuse. It gets much higher limits; its messages still count towards your allowance.
- Transactional message
- A message about a customer’s own visit. Needs no marketing consent, and on a paid plan keeps sending when the allowance runs out. On Free, texts and WhatsApp stop until next month while push and email carry on.
- Unusual activity
- A sudden burst of online joins at one branch. Queue Join switches on extra checks there for an hour and tells you on the dashboard and by email.
- Visit
- One customer on one occasion on the waitlist. Sometimes called an entry.
- Voice call pack
- An add-on of 300, 700 or 1,500 automated calls a month, for any paid plan. Without one, Queue Join never phones a customer.
- Waitlist
- The live queue customers join to be seen now, as opposed to booking a time later.
- WhatsApp template
- The wording of a WhatsApp message, approved in advance by WhatsApp. Queue Join owns the templates, so you choose whether WhatsApp is used but not what it says.
These are not fixed
Most of the customer-facing nouns can be renamed to suit your business — a clinic has patients rather than customers, a restaurant has guests. See localisation. This glossary uses the defaults.