SMS is the most popular way to keep your team and customers up to date; especially so if you want to communicate quickly between the field and the office/customer.
If you are concerned about the costs associated with using our SMS messaging feature we recommend the following:
Review SMS Templates
First, Click the cog on the upper right side corner of your screen > then click Settings > then choose Email & SMS
We have 3 types of SMS templates
Instant
Reminder and
Triggered
and each has a template that can be used for the Customer, Technician or Scheduler notifications.
Triggered Messages
Triggered messages will only fire/trigger when the event occurs, this is usually a Job Status change or Job type (you could use this instead of reminder message); but can be a combination of items.
Some examples would be:
send a confirmation email to the Customer when a job is scheduled with the job details (you could also have set a reminder at job booking)
send a 'thank you for your business' to the customer after the job status is set to complete
Support for Renewal reminders for Customer
This feature was introduced for customers that schedule maintenance jobs 6 or 12 months in advance and provides the opportunity to send the 'Customer Reminder' when the job is booked and set the 'Customer Renewal Reminder' in advance (set and forget).
Tip: You can also set the Scheduler reminder to the same date or earlier than the 'Customer Renewal Reminder' to ensure the Scheduler can action the job (technician assignment, job type etc).
Go to Jobs > All > Click the Job# you want set reminders via email or sms.
Instant and reminder messages templates
Now, let's go to Settings. To change the message templates click on the little orange gear icon ⚙️ in the upper right corner of any page.
Click the Settings button at the top of the dropdown menu.
On the Settings page, from the top horizontal menu, hit Email & SMS button to
get to the message page.
Select the message type that you want to edit the templates for.
Make the changes to the template using {placeholders} to add customer and job information to your message. The placeholders will be replaced with the information on the job when you send the message, for example, Hi {customer-first-name}, as shown below.
A default template has been set up for you.
Edit the Instant Emails template. When you're done, click the Save template button to save the message.
IMPORTANT:
A part SMS is 160 characters (this may vary a little each way depending on the telco provider).
The use of placeholders will consume character count above what the actual placeholder used in the template is; ie the {customer address} as a placeholder is 18 characters in the template but in the actual message would be (as an example) 100 Bourke St, Melbourne (24 characters).
We can suggest:
keep the message brief and to the point
review the text and {placeholders} to reduce character count that may results in 2 or more part SMS's being used.
Remember a placeholder such as {address} could be long based on length of street name, suburb or city.
If its not necessary to have the address shown in the message then remove
Review by Customer, Technician, Scheduler what is actually necessary to have in the actual SMS
-> Tech's may be able to access address information from the job link {placeholder} in the MobileApp instead).Consider for some notifications whether an email is more appropriate where you can be broader with what you need to communicate
IMPORTANT: Sending this reminder is manual so if you don't want to rely on Schedulers remembering to do this for every job you think an SMS is required then leave the default SMS reminder text ON (as above).
Related Articles:
Trigger Messages on Job Status Change (refer to the bottom of the articles for SMS reminders)