Waitlist Automation: Convert Interest Into Booked Spots

A cancellation isn't just an empty slot — it's a fill opportunity. Analese's waitlist pipeline watches the calendar for cancellations, finds the next person inline, and sends a text with the shared disclosure offering the open slot. Reply YES and the offer books into the calendar. Reply NO and the next person gets the offer. If the timer expires, the offer rolls on automatically.

What you get

• Cancellation → next inline, in seconds — the dispatcher watches your calendar and fires the moment a confirmed booking drops off.
• YES / NO reply flow — the responder can take the slot or stay in line with one tap.
• Auto-roll-forward on timeout — if the responder doesn't reply within the timer window, the offer moves on.
• Same consent ledger as the SMS pipeline — STOP, CANCEL, END, QUIT, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE all honored, never texts that number again.

How the waitlist dispatcher runs

1. 01A confirmed booking drops off your calendar — cancellation, no-show, or manual edit through the dashboard.
2. 02The /api/waitlist/cancellation-scan cron (run on a scheduled cadence) reads the off-calendar booking and finds the next inline responder.
3. 03An SMS with the shared disclosure goes out offering the open slot, with the same first-send line the rest of the SMS pipeline uses.
4. 04Reply YES — the responder's caller parses the intent (parseWaitlistClaimIntent) and books the slot into the calendar in one round-trip.
5. 05Reply NO — the responder stays in line; the next inline gets the offer when the next cancellation fires.
6. 06Reply STOP — the system acks with the same STOP_ACK string used everywhere else and removes the number from the waitlist.

A buyer question: how long does the rollover take?

Configurable per business. The default timer is a few minutes; some businesses set it tighter (30–60s for high-velocity calendars like salon walk-in fills), and some set it longer (10–15 min for higher-friction appointments like dental hygiene). The cron scans for cancellation events on a schedule, so the offer latency is the worst-case cron interval, not a real-time round-trip.

A buyer question: does this work for any vertical?

Yes, but the highest-value use cases are the ones with no-show risk and a calendar that fills up — dental recall, salon walk-in, vet vaccine schedules, and anything where a last-minute cancellation costs you a slot you could resell. The waiter pipeline rides on the waitlist dispatcher's vertical-agnostic intent parser. Whether the second inline responder is a 'next on the recall list' or a 'next inline on today's walk-in' is a configuration choice, not a pipeline change.