Routing and failover
Routes are ordered by priority and weighted within a connection. The point of the arrangement is that a provider rejecting sends degrades into slower sending, not into silence.
Read the guide →Send the outage notice from a path that is still up
An incident alert arrives when something is already wrong — the worst possible moment to discover your send path is down too. Keep more than one connected account on that channel, and the notice about the outage is not its first casualty.
What belongs in an incident update
Send an update when the state changes, not on a fixed cadence that produces messages with nothing new in them. A silence that was promised is better than a message that says nothing.
- What is affected, in plain terms
- What the recipient should do, if anything
- When the next update will come
- A link to the live status page
Two connected accounts, so the notice still leaves
Incident traffic should not depend on a single provider account — the day you need it is the day you cannot afford a second failure. On the SMS channel, traffic can route to another connected account when one stops accepting traffic, and receipts show what actually left.
- Automatic failover between connected SMS accounts
- Per-number pacing so an affected-account send does not stall
- Receipt status recorded so “we told them” is provable
Scope the list, or lose the audience
Sending an incident alert to every address you hold is how a service message becomes noise. Scope the recipient list to genuinely affected accounts — the platform sends to the list you give it, so the accuracy of that list is on your side.
Questions this usually raises
- Can alerts be sent on WhatsApp as well as SMS?
- You can connect the accounts you hold on each channel. Automatic failover between accounts is implemented for the SMS channel.
- Do we need a second provider to make this work?
- Failover needs somewhere to fail over to, which means more than one connected account on that channel.
- Will alerts respect opt-outs?
- A service or incident notice to an affected account is transactional, so it is not filtered by promotional suppression.
Keep reading
Pacing, quotas and why we queue
Every connection carries a send rate. The platform queues to that rate instead of firing as fast as a provider will accept, because the fastest way to get throttled is to send at the speed that causes it.
Read the guide →One-time passwords
Your login depends on a code landing before the session expires. Connect the accounts you already pay for and the platform paces each code to the number it leaves from — so a burst of logins drains at the speed your numbers allow instead of queueing behind one shared quota.
Open →Order confirmations
The confirmation is the message your customer keeps — forwarded, screenshotted, quoted back to support. Send it the moment the order lands, on a channel they actually read, and let the log answer for it later.
Open →Shipping and delivery updates
Dispatch notices, tracking updates and delivery windows go out when the state actually changes, not on a timer. On the SMS channel the platform spreads a dispatch batch to the limit your provider applies per number, so a whole route does not stall halfway through.
Open →Appointment reminders
A reminder earns its place by arriving early enough to change a plan and saying only what the person needs to act on: when, where, and how to change it. Send a confirmation at booking and a timed reminder before, on the number they booked with.
Open →Payment reminders
The reminder that arrives before a due date is a service; the one that arrives after is a complaint notification. Send both, keep them transactional, and pace the due-date batch so it drains in a time you can plan around.
Open →Two-factor authentication
A 2FA message is triggered by a login attempt, is time-critical, and — when it arrives unexpectedly — is the earliest signal your customer gets that someone else has their password. Send it fast, word it as a warning, and keep the record.
Open →Account security alerts
A security alert is not a notification — it is the account owner’s chance to interrupt something in progress. Speed and clarity are the whole job, and detail is a liability.
Open →Customer feedback requests
A feedback request is marketing in everything but name, so treat it like one: one question, sent once, to people who have not opted out. That is what keeps the answers worth reading.
Open →Scope. Whaleal Platform sends over the CPaaS or BSP accounts you already hold. Your contracts, your rates and your sender identities stay yours, and nothing in the middle reprices them. Routing and pacing run on the SMS channel while logging covers every channel; consent and content stay with you.