To notify your customers about some event associated with the order status, use the option of SMS/Email messages.

For e-mail notifications we strongly recommend to use your own smtp-server. For details on how to set up your smtp-server, see SMTP E-mail (Outgoing emails configuration).

To simplify the notification process, MaxOptra provides you to create sms or email messages templates to be used in future for customer notification on different events. To create the templates, under the Account Administrator or Dispatcher role go to Settings tab > Customer communications > SMS/Email messages:

Select the template you need and indicate the type of notification: Send sms or Send e-mail.

Note Notifications are first set up at the Account level, but can also be adjusted at the Customer location parameters and/or at the Order parameters level. For more details on how these settings correlate, seeManaging Individual Customer Notification Settings.

You can delay sending notifications by using the Sending time option. If your clients do not want to be disturbed during certain time of the day/night, tick the Sending time checkbox and select the time range.

Notification sending will be postponed till the end of this time. For example, the delivery is planned for 9am, and the notification should be sent 2 hours before delivery, i.e, at 7am. If we set the silent hours range from 10pm-8am, the notification will be postponed till the end of the period and will be sent shortly after 8.00am.

Note If an order has reached its terminal status (completed/failed) during the silent hours period, only the “Order is completed”/ “Order is failed” notification will be sent to the client (provided that this type of notification is enabled, see below), skipping all the intermediate notifications. If the order completion/failure notification is not enabled for the client, then they will receive all the notifications standing in queue when the silence time is over.

Using the SMS/Email notifications feature you may send the following types of messages to your customers up to 14 days before planned date:

This message will be sent to the customer simultaneously when order details are sent to the driver.

Note:

This message will be sent to the customer automatically after the driver notifies that he starts off for the order.

Note This notification better works for the type of business where drivers, having received the run schedule, do not stick to the sequence of orders and visit customer locations in free turn.

You notify your customer that an order will be delivered to the specified address in N minutes before the order's ETA. This message will be sent to the customer automatically within the specified period before estimated arrival at the customer's address (fill in the Notification before field).

Note

The notification is sent N minutes before arrival to the customer based on estimated time of arrival (ETA), which is calculated based on the arrival time to the previous location. The system expects that each location will be visited in its turn, as planned. The notification will not work if the sequence of visits is changed, hence, the algorithm is broken. This may be a deliberate violation of order sequence or a mistakenly entered and geocoded address. That is why this notification should used for the type of business where drivers, having received the run schedule, stick to the order sequence and visit each customer location in its proper turn.

To understand how ETA is calculated in MaxOptra using internal logic or the 3-d party geoproviders, see ETA in MaxOptra.

This message will be sent to the customer after the order is successfully completed. In case of this notification, it is possible to attach the Proof of Delivery Template file (electronic proof of delivery) to the customer. Just tick the Attach POD checkbox and specify the name of the POD file.

This notification will be sent to the customer in case the order is not delivered to the specified address. Here you can specify the order fail reason as well, which is the same as the reason reported by the driver from his mobile device.

This action allows users to automatically send notifications to clients a specified number of days before the delivery. This type of notification is useful when the company needs to agree the final delivery date/time with the client. The customer is notified about the upcoming delivery N days before it actually happens to make sure this delivery day/time is right for them. If something is wrong, the client has time to cancel or rebook the delivery.

Set the number of days before the delivery and the time when the notification should be sent to client (Number of days before planned arrival and Sent at respectively).

Note

To edit the message templates, select the action you need from the Action list and start editing your message. When editing the message you may use the option of automatic insertion of some parameters (tags):

Note If the tag was added to the message template, but the corresponding field was not filled out in the Order form, then this information will no be displayed in the final message.