A driver replied but the check-in still shows Late

Symptom: the driver swears they texted back. The check-in is still sitting at Requested, or it went to Late and escalated anyway.

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1. Did the reply reach the app at all?

Open the driver's page and look at their message history, or check the check-in's messages.

• The reply is there but not attached to the check-in → go to step 3.
• The reply is nowhere → go to step 2.

2. The reply never arrived

They texted the wrong number

Drivers reply to whatever is in their phone. If they texted your cell, your old office line, or a number they saved years ago, the app never sees it. Ask them to scroll to the message they received and reply to that thread.

They replied from a different phone

Inbound texts are matched to a driver by the number they come from. A reply from a second phone, a spouse's phone, or a truck-stop phone will not match the driver on file. It is still recorded, just not linked.

Fix: make sure the number in Drivers → the driver → Phone is the mobile number they actually text from. One driver, one number.

They replied STOP at some point

STOP is handled automatically and stops future messages to that number. Check their consent status on the driver's page. Only the driver can undo it, by texting START.

3. The reply arrived but the check-in did not close

A reply attaches to the driver's most recent open check-in from the last 24 hours. It will not attach when:

• The check-in is older than 24 hours. A driver replying to yesterday's message is recorded, but the old check-in stays where it is.
• The check-in was already closed — responded to, or manually closed.
• There was no open check-in. An unprompted text from a driver ("I'm stuck at the scale") is recorded against the driver, but there is nothing for it to answer.

None of these lose the message. Read it on the driver's page and close the check-in by hand.

4. It escalated even though they answered

Escalation fires when a check-in passes your late response threshold with no attached reply. If the reply came in but did not attach — any of the reasons above — the escalation was working from what it could see.

Two things worth adjusting:

• Settings → Late response threshold (min), default 60. A driver in a no-signal stretch of interstate is not ignoring you.
• Make sure loads get moved to Delivered promptly. Escalations are suppressed on finished loads, but only once the load says it is finished.

5. The reply attached but the details were read wrong

The status, location, and ETA are pulled out of whatever the driver wrote. Slang, shorthand, and voice-to-text mangling all cost accuracy. The raw text is always kept alongside the parsed version — read it and correct the load by hand.

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When to contact support

Send the driver's mobile number, when they say they replied, and whether the message shows anywhere in the app. Those three facts separate a delivery problem from a matching problem.

Related

• Set up driver check-ins
• Texts to drivers are not being delivered