Set up your customer notifications in 5 steps:

Navigate to the Customer Notifications tab. The Notifications Settings should be the first section you see.

When you first add Customer Notifications to your account, notifications are all disabled by default to ensure you don't accidentally send any notifications to customers. 

You can choose either SMS or email notifications. At this time, you cannot choose both. You can change this setting at any time.

IF YOU CHOOSE SMS NOTIFICATIONS...

Keep your message to 150 characters. In an effort to combat spam, carriers are more aggressive at rejecting long messages.

IF YOU CHOOSE EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS...

Enter the name you want your customers to see when they receive a customer notification email from you. Typically, this name will be your company name.

Enter the email you want to send the notification from.

A few things to note:

1) Customers can reply to this email, so you want to ensure this is a valid email address that is monitored by your team in case your customers reach out with questions.

2) The email notifications are actually sent from no-reply@notifications.routific.com. As soon as the customer hits reply however, the to: field will be pre-populated with your email address.

In the example below, we've filled out our company email address as 'suzanne@averysjuice.com'. Customers will receive email notifications from no-reply@notifications.routific.com, but if they reply, messages will be sent to 'suzanne@averysjuice.com'.

Finally... Enter your company name, address and phone number. This will appear in the footer of your email and is required for email compliance regulations, such as CAN-SPAM and CASL. Your emails will also include an unsubscribe link. Read more on how we handle unsubscribes here.

Navigate to the Notifications Templates section. You will see four different types of notifications:

Turn on whichever types of notification you would like to send to your customers. Find out what each template is and when they're triggered here.

*Once you turn notifications on in your account, notifications will send for all dispatched projects! If you're testing, please make sure to remove customers' emails and phone numbers from their stops before turning notifications on.* 

Customize your notifications by clicking the “Edit” button for any of the templates in the Notification Templates section, or by clicking the email template name in the left-hand menu.

If you choose to customize the body copy of your email templates, be sure keep the variables (ie. {eta_window}, {date}, etc). Otherwise, your customer won’t know when their particular delivery is on its way or completed. 

For example, if you remove the {eta_window} variable from Planned ETA email template (or simply write ‘eta_delivery’ without the parentheses), but keep the {date} variable, your recipients will just receive an email that says the delivery is coming on a specific date without any indication of when they should expect it.

All variables available for a particular template can be found by clicking "Add Tag" inside the template editor.

You can edit the the Planned Delivery ETA and Out for Delivery time windows. Find out the triggers for each template here so you can determine appropriate time windows for your business.

Customer Notifications will only be sent to customers that have an email filled out (if you're using email notifications) or a mobile phone number filled out to be sent (if you're using SMS notifications).

Customers without the appropriate contact details filled out will not be sent notifications. 

Note: Phone numbers must be formatted as country code, area code, phone number. For example, "+1-626-555-1234". Spaces, (brackets), - dashes, and + plus signs are all accepted in the phone number field.

You can add the contact details to your CSV upload, to your Customer Profiles, or by adding them individually for each customer you want to notify.

Before you publish a route and start sending notifications to your customers, make sure to run a test with your own phone number first, to ensure all the templates are working properly.

You can make sure you're triggering all the notifications by following this list of triggers.