Kettle is a 23-store specialty coffee chain. We do mobile orders, a loyalty program, a once-a-quarter coffee subscription drop, and a small wholesale book. By March 2025 we were sending SMS through four different tools: one for transactional order alerts, one for the loyalty program, one for promotional drops, and one for our wholesale team's rep-to-buyer texts. None of them talked to each other. Each one had its own opt-out list. Each one had its own bill.
The breaking point was when a customer who had STOPped our promo list got a wholesale rep text and threatened to file a TCPA complaint. He had a different phone for personal vs. business and we'd accidentally landed on both. The investigation took nine days.
We could not answer a basic question — “is this person allowed to receive a text from us right now?” — without checking four databases.
What we moved over
We picked Treply because it was the only platform our engineering lead agreed to without asking for a slack thread of caveats. The migration was three weeks: two weeks for the data move and one week for our marketing team to get used to a new sender flow.
- Order/transactional alerts — moved from a Twilio function to a Triggly automation listening to our Stripe webhook.
- Loyalty texts — recreated as a single audience “loyalty members · last visit < 90d” with two campaign templates.
- Promo drops — same thing, with an A/B variant on subject line that auto-stopped at significance.
- Wholesale reps — they got the unified inbox and a per-rep number.
What changed
Three months in, here's what stuck. Reply rate went from 3.8% to 12.4% — partly because the messages got better, partly because Treply deduped 14% of our send list (carrier-flagged numbers our previous tools were happily sending to). Send cost dropped 41% because we were no longer paying four base fees plus four sets of overage. Engineering time on SMS plumbing went from “something every sprint” to zero.
The thing I didn't expect: the unified inbox got our customer service team six hours of their week back. Every reply, regardless of which sender it came from, lands in the same place. No more “is this a transactional reply or a promo reply” triage.
What we're still figuring out
We have a small WhatsApp footprint internationally that we haven't moved over yet — the Treply WhatsApp integration shipped six weeks ago and we want another month of soak time before we trust it for the EU team. Otherwise: this is what we wish we'd had two years ago.