Geofence Triggered Alerts and Forms for POD Collection

When your delivery drivers and field employees are on the road or servicing customers, they may need to capture different types of valuable actionable intelligence that are crucial for your last mile operation. With Route4Me’s Android and iOS multi stop route planner apps, your delivery drivers, field service technicians, or field sales reps can add notes with order statuses and custom descriptions to your route stops. Moreover, they can also attach photos, videos, audio recordings, and even captured electronic signatures (Sign on Glass) to your routes which can serve as electronic proof of delivery (ePOD).

However, since most drivers have to visit multiple destinations to complete their routes, it can be inconvenient and time-consuming to manually find each destination on their routes and manually add notes. In addition to that, if you factor in various human factors, some team members can simply forget to add notes to customers’ addresses due to a fast-paced business environment.

With Route4Me’s dynamic routing software, you can set up triggered geofence alerts and forms that will automatically prompt your field employees to collect proof of service or ePOD by adding notes to their routes upon entering the geofences set around each route stop that they visit. Once enabled, each time a driver enters the geofence set around any route stop, Route4Me will detect it, activate a sound notification on the driver’s route planner app, and automatically open the “Add Note” screen for the corresponding stop.

After that, the driver will have to fill out the note’s contents and attach it as proof of service or proof of delivery to the route stop in order to be able to mark this stop as Visited and Departed. Route4Me’s geofencing is implemented on the client-side, allowing to trigger geofences even without an internet connection and then synchronize all captured data once the connection is restored.

 

To enable the geofence alerts that trigger the notes to open for a particular route stop or an entire route, first, open the preferred route from your Routes List or your Routes Map.

Route4Me Geofence Triggered Alerts and Forms (Notes)

 

Next, add the triggered geofence alerts variable as custom data to the preferred route stops. To do so, first, click on the preferred stop to open its menu and then click on the “Add Custom Data” button.

Route4Me Geofence Triggered Alerts and Forms (Notes)

 

After that, input the variable “custom_trigger_open_notes_dialog” into the “Field Name” field and then input “TRUE” into the “Field Content” field to enable the variable. To apply the changes and finish, click on the “Add Custom Data” button accordingly.

Route4Me Geofence Triggered Alerts and Forms (Notes)

 

Once the variable is added and enabled for the corresponding route stop, it can be managed in the “Custom Data” section of the stop’s menu. NOTE: To disable the variable, either delete it or change its value to “FALSE“.

Route4Me Geofence Triggered Alerts and Forms (Notes)

 

To add the same triggered geofence alerts to all stops on the route, first, click on the gear icon next to the corresponding variable in the “Custom Data” section of the stop’s menu and then select “Apply to All” accordingly.

Route4Me Geofence Triggered Alerts and Forms (Notes)

 

Once the geofence triggered notes alert is enabled for the given route stop, when the assigned field employee enters the geofence set around this route stop, the “Add Note” screen will automatically pop up on the user’s Android Route Planner with the corresponding notification and sound alert. After that, this team member will have to fill out the note’s contents before proceeding.

Route4Me Geofence Triggered Alerts and Forms (Notes)

 

Only after the assigned team member adds the opened note to the corresponding route stop and closes the note’s screen, this team member will be able to mark the stop as Visited and Departed. For your convenience, you can also enable geofences and geofence activities on the interactive map.

Route4Me Geofence Triggered Alerts and Forms (Notes)

 

 

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About Route4Me

Route4Me has over 40,000 customers globally. Route4Me's Android and iPhone mobile apps have been downloaded over 2 million times since 2009. Extremely easy-to-use, Route4Me's apps create optimized routes, synchronize routes to mobile devices, enable communication with drivers and customers, offer turn-by-turn directions, delivery confirmation, and more. Behind the scenes, Route4Me's operational optimization platform combines high-performance algorithms with data science, machine learning, and big data to plan, optimize, and analyze routes of almost any size in real-time.