Frequently Asked Questions

Mystique is an AI-powered SMS business operator. It answers customer texts instantly, qualifies leads, books appointments, takes payments, and runs your calendar 24/7 so you stop losing jobs to slow replies.

No. Chatbots reply. Mystique closes. It's built to drive every conversation toward a real outcome — a booking, a deposit, a paid appointment — not just answer questions and disappear.

Service businesses that take inbound texts and book appointments. Detailers, barbers, salons, auto dealerships, cleaners, landscapers, med spas, contractors, dentists, coaches — anyone losing leads to delayed responses.

Outcome-driven: every conversation pushes toward a booking, not a chat. Database-truth: never invents facts, prices, or availability. Owner-operated by SMS: no dashboard required to run the business day-to-day. Self-improving: every night it learns what's working and what isn't. White-label: your customers talk to your brand, not ours.

That's your call. Most owners brand it as their business. Some disclose, some don't. The conversations are natural enough that customers rarely ask.

Customer texts your business number. Mystique replies instantly, naturally. It collects what's needed: name, service, time, address. You get a YES or NO confirmation text on your phone. You reply YES and the customer gets a payment link. They pay and the booking is locked in. End to end in under 5 minutes, fully automated.

No. You run the business by SMS. The dashboard exists if you want analytics, calendar views, or to tweak settings, but daily operations happen on your phone.

SMS today via SignalWire. The architecture supports more channels like Telegram and web chat as needed.

Mystique replies to customers 24/7, but it never sends outbound messages outside your configured hours. Customers get instant answers at midnight; you don't get woken up.

Mystique handles availability checks itself before bothering you. If the time is open, you get a clean YES or NO. If you don't reply, the lifecycle clock follows up automatically and escalates if needed.

It pulls from your configured knowledge — services, pricing, hours, capabilities, inventory — stored in the database. It never invents an answer. If it doesn't know, it asks you or flags the gap for review.

Yes. It detects intent and adapts tone: informative for the curious, reassuring for the hesitant, value-driven for price shoppers, closing for ready buyers. Same business, different tone per customer.

It redirects gracefully back to the goal — booking — without being pushy or robotic.

Yes. Every phone number is a persistent identity. It remembers preferences, past bookings, objections, and outcomes across sessions.

Yes. Pick from 12 pre-built tones like warm, professional, playful, direct — or customize the persona. Tone changes never disable selling; the sales operator core is protected.

They're opted out immediately. No further messages go to that number. Fully TCPA compliant.

Mystique stays professional. If a conversation goes truly off the rails, it can escalate to a human operator with full context.

Stripe. When you confirm a booking, the customer gets a payment link. Once they pay, the appointment is locked in. You're notified instantly.

The lifecycle clock automatically resends a fresh link before the lead goes cold. You don't lose customers to expired links.

The appointment stays in payment pending. After a configurable timeout, Mystique re-engages or expires the slot. The time isn't held forever.

Yes. Booking fees are configurable per business.

Refunds happen through Stripe directly. The lifecycle engine has a refunded status to keep the record clean.

Yes. Multi-booking support is live with conversation-scoped leads. Each booking cycle starts a clean lead while carrying forward identity like name, phone, and email.

Whatever you configure: name, phone, email, address, service, appointment time, plus any custom fields you require. All validated before saving.

Your choice. Mystique supports both models. In customer-paid mode, a small booking fee is charged to your customer at confirmation — it acts as a no-show deposit and comes to Mystique. In owner-paid mode, your customer sees zero extra charges and Mystique draws the fee from a prepaid credit balance on your account. You pick the model that fits your market.

When you're on the owner-paid model, you load credits onto your account and Mystique draws from that balance each time a booking completes. Credits auto-refill from your saved card when the balance runs low, so the system never stops working mid-conversation.

In owner-paid mode, no deposit is collected from your customer, so there is no financial no-show deterrent on the customer side. Most owners choosing this model are established businesses with strong repeat-customer relationships where no-shows are rare. If no-show protection matters to you, customer-paid is the right fit.

Yes. Your billing model is a per-business setting you can change from your owner dashboard. Switching applies to new bookings going forward — it does not affect any existing confirmed appointments.

Mystique actively puts your business in front of people in your local market who are already looking for the services you provide. Rather than waiting for someone to find your number, Mystique identifies real local demand signals and routes qualified prospects directly to your Mystique number — before they find a competitor.

When a qualified prospect is routed to your number, they reach out to you first. Mystique's SMS booking AI handles the conversation from there — qualifying, booking, and confirming the appointment automatically. No extra action required on your end beyond your normal Mystique setup.

Related but different. The Live Demand page at mystique-ai.com/demand shows aggregated demand data across service categories in your area — it is a market-level view of what people are actively looking for. Proactive demand is the operational layer that routes those signals into confirmed bookings for your business.

No. Proactive demand is part of how Mystique operates — it is built into the platform, not a separate add-on. You only ever pay per completed booking, regardless of how the lead was sourced.

You configure your business hours, services with a duration each, and any blocked times. Mystique checks all of it before suggesting a time.

Mystique automatically suggests 3 alternative times within business hours. You're never asked to approve something that won't work.

Yes. Text Mystique something like "Block off Friday 9am to 3pm for staff meeting." It parses, saves, and confirms back.

Yes — daily, weekdays, weekly, or monthly patterns. You can also unblock specific dates within a recurring pattern.

Yes. Full Detail might be 120 minutes, Basic Wash 30 minutes. Mystique uses the right duration for each booking.

Each business runs in its own configured timezone. Availability checks, reminders, the clock worker, and the iCal feed all respect it.

Yes. Generate an iCal feed URL from the dashboard and subscribe on iPhone, Android, or Google Calendar.

Revoke and regenerate from the dashboard. One click.

Yes. Create event slots with capacity, like a yoga class for 15. Customers can reserve multiple spots and the fee multiplies automatically. Booked count prevents overbooking.

An appointment is one customer, one slot — like a haircut, detail, or consultation. An event is multiple customers sharing a slot — like a class, workshop, or group session. Mystique handles both natively.

Yes. Text something like "Cancel my Friday appointments." Mystique finds them, cancels, notifies customers with reschedule alternatives, and confirms back to you.

The customer gets numbered alternatives. When they pick a new time, the original payment carries over — no new Stripe charge, no re-entering card info.

Yes. Text something like "Move the yoga class to 3pm" or "Add 5 more spots to the class." Mystique matches existing events and edits in place.

Two or more pending and you get a single SMS with a calendar link to a token-authenticated page where you can review and approve everything in one view. No login required.

• Block time
• Create events or classes
• Cancel appointments
• Edit or delete blocks and events
• Query your schedule ("what does my week look like?")
• Ask about leads ("any new ones today?")
• Ask about payments ("who hasn't paid?")
• Confirm or deny pending bookings with YES or NO codes

Phone number recognition. Owner queries route through a separate read-only handler that pulls from owner-facing database views.

No keyword matching. An LLM intent classifier figures out what you're trying to do and routes accordingly. Talk naturally — "I'm out sick tomorrow," "cancel everything Friday," "what's my week look like" — and it figures it out.

It asks for clarification rather than acting on a guess. Better to ask than to cancel the wrong appointment.

A new business can be onboarded in under an hour. Most of the work is automated — point Mystique at your website and it scrapes services, hours, capabilities, and inventory using OpenAI extraction.

No. Configuration is dropdown-driven. Pick your tone, define your services and pricing, set your hours, define what counts as a win — done.

Yes. Multi-URL website scraper with auto-scheduling, default 7-day refresh. It extracts your profile, hours, capabilities, and inventory automatically.

The scraper re-runs on schedule. Safe changes auto-apply. Risky changes like description and tone get flagged in your Updates tab for accept or dismiss.

Connectors like DEALERSYNC pull real-time inventory directly. Mystique never sells a car that was sold yesterday.

Yes — the Insights tab in the admin dashboard shows living summaries across 6 categories, updated nightly.

Always. You control the persona, tone, win conditions, capabilities, pricing, and knowledge documents.

Mystique charges per completed booking — not a monthly subscription. There are no seats, no contracts, and no fee unless Mystique actually delivers a confirmed job. Pricing per booking varies by business type and service value.

Most businesses recover the cost in 1 to 2 saved bookings per month. If you're losing more leads than that to slow replies, it pays for itself in week one.

Response performance tracking: every reply is tagged with whether it converted. Nightly optimizer summaries show what's working and what isn't. The Insights tab is visible and real-time. Stripe payments mean bookings are paid bookings, not maybes.

Varies by industry, but businesses replacing manual SMS handling typically see 2 to 5 times more bookings from the same lead volume.

Yes. Even at $30 per booking, recovering 2 bookings a week pays for the system many times over.

Yes. Multi-tenant architecture with full isolation. Each business has its own number, config, memory, rules, and data. No cross-tenant leakage.

Yes. STOP, HELP, and START handling is built in. Opted-out customers can never receive outbound messages, even from automated workers.

Postgres database on managed infrastructure. Encrypted at rest and in transit.

JWT auth with rate limiting and CSP headers on the admin route. API keys for programmatic access. All endpoints production-grade secured.

Yes — retention worker handles cleanup, and manual deletion is supported.

Stripe handles all payment data. Mystique never sees card numbers.

SMS through SignalWire. Payments through Stripe. Calendar through iCal (works with iPhone, Android, and Google Calendar). AI through OpenAI — GPT-4o for conversations, GPT-4o-mini for classifiers. Inventory through DEALERSYNC connector.

The architecture supports it. Contact us about specific integrations.

Yes. API-key authenticated endpoints for businesses, JWT for admin operations.

Self-hosted on dedicated infrastructure. White-label deployments are supported.

Production-grade with 7 PM2 workers running on schedule. Platform API is always-on. Scraper runs every 6 hours. Connector runs every 4 hours. Optimizer runs at 2am. Retention runs at 3am. Confirmation runs every 2 hours. Lifecycle clock runs every 15 minutes.

Lifecycle engine queues state transitions and retries. SMS retry logic on every outbound send. Webhook idempotency keys prevent duplicate processing.