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
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.
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
Automated Triggering
We allow a setting that sends automated Job reminders to Customer, Units, Technicians or Schedulers when set. Reminders can be SMS or email.
We can suggest:
Use SMS as a default where relevant (such as Customer, Technician)
Other reminders can use Email
Note: if you do remove SMS as a default reminder you can still send an individual Instant SMS when scheduling (or changing job details) before closing the Job Page.
IMPORTANT: Sending this reminder is manual so if you dont 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)