Customer Notifications and Alerts Advanced Settings

Depending on the unique needs of your particular business model or the geographical location of your business operation, you may need to change the time and date formats in which your customers receive notifications, set a limit on the time when your customers should be able to view your drivers on the Order Tracking Portal, send out notifications in advance, as well as adjust other important advanced settings. Thus, in addition to supporting all main channels of communication and multiple customization options, the Customer Alerting and Notifications Module also provides a set of advanced settings that enable you to add an extra layer of customization to your notifications.

To adjust the advanced settings for your Customer Alerting and Notifications, first, go to “Notification Settings” from the navigation menu.

In the “Notifications” tab, you can set up the time for sending out notifications to customers when their routes are dispatched in advance of the scheduled time. To do so, first, in the “Notifications” tab, go to “Advance Notification.” Next, drag the “Advance Notification Interval” toggle to set up the number of days for the advance notifications. After that, input the “Advance Notification Time” at which you want the corresponding notifications to be sent out. In the example below, if a particular route is dispatched 2 days in advance of its scheduled start time, then the customers on this route will get the corresponding notifications 1 day in advance of the route’s start, at 07:00 AM.

NOTE: The Advance Notification settings are applied only to the ”Scheduled” notification type.

In the “Advanced” tab, you can adjust the preferred time and date formats, as well as other advanced settings.

Adjusting the “ETA Padding” allows you to set up the earliest and the latest arrival times and create looser visitation time windows. To set up the “ETA Padding,” input the preferred time into the corresponding field. The value defined in the “ETA Padding” field is split in half, where one half is applied to the earliest arrival time ({{earliest_arrival_time}} placeholder) and the second half is applied to the latest arrival time ({{max_arrival_time}} placeholder).

For example, if the Planned Arrival Time of a particular route stop is 7:30 PM and the “ETA Padding” is set to “30 minutes,” then the earliest arrival time ({{earliest_arrival_time}}) will be 07:15 PM and the latest arrival time ({{max_arrival_time}}) will be 07:45 PM. You can find the list of all available placeholders and learn how to use them on this page.

When you have multiple customers on one route, you may not want each customer to be able to view your drivers visiting other customers’ locations. To adjust the time when each customer should be able to view the driver’s location on the map of the Order Tracking Portal, use the “Time to Arrive to Show a Driver on Map” field to adjust the corresponding setting.

For example, provided that the “Time to Arrive to Show a Driver on Map” value is set to “5 minutes,” then all your customers will be able to view your drivers on the map of the Order Tracking Portal only when your drivers are less than 5 minutes away from visiting the customers’ locations.

The “Time to Next” parameters show the travel time from the given stop to the next one on the route. To view the “Time to Next” parameters of a particular stop, in the Route Editor, hover your cursor over that stop to open its details window where you can view the corresponding parameters.

In the “Advanced” tab, you can also select the preferred time and date formats to use in your notifications. This feature is particularly useful when you want to match the specific time and date formats with your own system or when you work with different customers that use different time and date formats. To adjust the time and date formats, select the preferred options from the corresponding dropdown lists in the “Advanced” tab.

Once adjusted, the time and date formats in your customer notifications will correspond to the selected options. Thus, when you use placeholders for retrieving Route4Me fixed attributes (i.e., arrival times, geofence triggered timestamps, etc.), the selected time and date formats will be used accordingly. You can find the list of all available placeholders and learn how to use them on this page. To learn how to enable SMS and E-Mail notifications, visit this page.