Customize and automate notifications to keep your clients in the loop at key points before, during, and after the work.
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Jobber has the ability to send text message reminders to clients of upcoming scheduled services. Texts to customers can help reduce no-show appointments, cancellations, and time spent travelling to unconfirmed jobs.
Along with reminding your clients about upcoming visits, text message reminders can also give the option for clients to confirm their appointments via text, and for users on the Jobber app to send "on my way" notifications.
Enabling client phone numbers to receive text messages
On the edit screen of each client, there is an option to enable their phone number to receive text messages. In order for a client to receive notifications like "on my way" text messages, this will need to be enabled. You can edit this setting by going to a client and clicking the Edit button in the top right corner.
Enabling text message reminders
Go to the Gear icon > Settings > Notifications. In the section for Doing the Work, make sure the toggle for assessment and visit reminders is set to ON.
Click Edit to set up the schedule for the reminders. You can enable 2 different reminder schedules. Each reminder can be set to deliver either 1-24 hours/days in advance of the scheduled assessment or visit. We suggest using one email reminder and one text reminder for maximum effectiveness.
You can either set a specific or visit based time for the text message reminder to go out.
For example, a reminder set to go out 1 day before the visit or assessment would send out 24hrs before that time: a job at 7am on a Thursday would have the reminder go out at 7am the day before, Wednesday.
Note: Text message reminders for anytime visits will only send if you specify a time.
For example, you set text message reminders to go out 1 day before a visit that was set for Thursday but no specific time set for the visit. The text message in this case will not go out because an “All day” visit doesn’t have a time associated with it. We recommend in this case that you set your text message reminders to go out at a specific time, such as 1 day before at 9:00AM; this way your clients will always get text reminders at a reasonable time.
Note: All times in the settings page are local, based on the time zone you have set in the Company Branding page in Settings.
On the same edit screen, you can set up the templates for your reminders. There are four templates available: assessment email, assessment text message, visit email, and visit text message. These templates will allow you to make custom messages for each type of reminder.
There is a character counter at the bottom of the edit section. Text messages in Jobber carry a 160 character limit, as anything over this will not send through text properly.
At this time we only support text in these messages, so we can't use emojis or URLs in the templates. This is mainly to protect against phone companies (like AT&T or Verizon) blocking our phone numbers from your clients receiving text messages.
Sending Text Reminders
You can also add variables into the text message reminder if you wish. This will automatically populate certain details into the message, such as visit time.
On the client end, this is an example of what the message will look like:
Once the link is tapped, it will confirm the visit and redirect to the Client Hub where the client can see the appointment time and who is coming. Another way to confirm the visit is for the client to reply "ok" to this text.
Once a client has confirmed you will see the confirmation directly on the Request assessment or Visit.
Note: Please note that the only accepted response for text message reminders is "ok" (OK, Ok, okay and Okay are also accepted. If your clients send a response other than "ok", the system will respond with a message instructing them to get in contact with your business directly:
"On My Way" Notifications
Using the Jobber Mobile app, users can send an "on my way" message to the client based on their scheduled appointment for the day. They will look like this:
For more information about "on my way" notifications, check out this article.
Reporting
All text reminders and notifications sent out to clients will appear in the Client Communication Report, in the Management tab. From here, you'll see all messages sent, who they were sent to, and the number this was sent to.