Small businesses running a loyalty programme live or die on how easy it is to add a new member, and any extra step between a customer showing interest and them actually being enrolled is a member you lose. Ostana is built for exactly that kind of operator, tracking loyalty and engagement without the manual admin, using actions like Create Member to add someone to the programme and Create Loyalty Event to log what they did to earn points.

Both actions expect Ostana to be handed details from earlier in a Zap rather than collecting them itself, so on their own they need something else to feed them. That's where a trigger from another part of the business, whether that's a purchase, a booking, or a text conversation, does the actual work of starting the process.

Paired with Mobile Message, an inbound text is one of the simplest ways to start that process. When a customer texts your business for the first time, a Zap can create them as a new member inside Ostana automatically, so the loyalty programme grows out of conversations you were already having by SMS rather than a separate sign up form. It turns a reply you'd already read into a member added to the programme without anyone doing the data entry.