Occasionally a client may tell you that your SMS reminder arrived showing a different business name — for example, a hair salon name when the message actually came from your clinic. This is not a bug in Client Diary, and the message did come from you. Here is why it happens and what you should know about it.

How SMS Reminders Are Sent

Client Diary sends appointment reminders through a third-party SMS provider using a shared phone number pool. This means the numeric phone number your clients receive messages from is the same number potentially used by other businesses on the same platform.

Shared numbers are standard practice across most SMS reminder services. They keep costs manageable and require no setup on your part.

Why a Different Business Name Appears

When your client receives the SMS, their phone tries to identify the sender. It does this automatically in several ways:

Smart suggestions from the phone’s OS — iPhones and Android phones scan your emails, previous messages, and linked apps to guess who a number belongs to. If that number was previously associated with another business in any of those sources, the phone may suggest that name.

Third-party caller ID apps — Apps like Truecaller, Hiya, or similar tools maintain large crowd-sourced databases that link phone numbers to names. If another business used the same shared number before your client received your message, the app may have already labelled it with that business name.

Carrier or manufacturer directories — Some mobile networks and phone manufacturers pull from business directories to identify incoming numbers. A match in their database will show a name automatically.

In all of these cases, the label is coming from your client’s phone or a third-party app — not from Client Diary or your SMS provider. The actual message content is yours and is delivered correctly.

Is There Anything I Can Do?

This behaviour is controlled entirely by the recipient’s device and apps, not by Client Diary or your SMS settings. There is no way to prevent a phone from applying its own contact or directory lookup to an incoming number.

The most reliable way to avoid this entirely is to send reminders from a dedicated sender number — a number assigned exclusively to your business. If this is something you need, contact us and we can advise on whether a dedicated number option is available for your account.

In the meantime, if a client is confused, you can reassure them that the message did come from your business and that the name shown is an automatic label applied by their phone, not a sign of any error or security issue.