Live chat is built into the Dots app: a customer opens their order, taps the chat, and talks directly to your team. No call center, no digging for a phone number, no third-party messenger where the conversation gets lost from the order it's about.
Every unanswered question is a lost order
Before the order: "does this contain nuts?", "can you deliver to my office?" — a customer who can't ask, closes the app. After the order: a missing drink or a late courier handled in chat costs you a partial credit and thirty seconds; the same problem left unhandled becomes a chargeback and a public one-star review. The economics are lopsided — resolving in chat is the cheapest outcome available. We ran the numbers on this in how restaurants cut refunds and chargebacks: fast first response is the single biggest lever.
There is a marketplace angle too. On aggregator platforms, support belongs to the platform — you never hear the complaint, you just pay for its resolution. In your own app, the conversation is yours, and so is the chance to fix things before money leaves.
How it works in the Dots app
The customer opens chat from the app; messages are tied to the customer profile, so your operator sees who is writing, their current order, and their history — no "please tell me your order number" round-trips. Operators answer from the Dots admin side, several people can share the queue, and the customer gets a push notification when a reply lands, so the conversation continues even after they close the app.
Because chat lives next to the order data, typical fixes take seconds: confirm an address change, add a note for the courier, agree a replacement item. The full thread stays on record for disputes.
Who gets the most out of it
- Delivery operations with real order volume — every percent of complaints moved from phone to chat frees staff time at peak.
- Venues fighting review-page damage: complaints resolved privately in chat rarely become public one-star reviews.
- Businesses without a call center — chat is asynchronous, so two operators handle what would take a phone team.
Related features
Branded app with built-in chat, ordering site, and delivery management — launched in about two weeks.