Route Scheduled – Customer Alerting and Notifications

With the Route Scheduled Add-On, you can automate the process of notifying your customers that their orders have been dispatched and that your drivers are on their way to visit each customer. Your Route Scheduled Notifications can contain order delivery time and date, order size or weight parameters, order tracking URL, and virtually any type of relevant data that you want your customers to receive. In addition to the custom text in your notification messages, you can also insert multiple informative placeholders that retrieve data from particular Route4Me fixed attributes (i.e., order numbers, customers’ names, estimated arrival times, etc.) and automatically insert this data into your notifications as text (learn more). Moreover, to fully accommodate the particular needs of your business or unique business model, Route4Me also enables you to customize the design of your Route Scheduled E-Mail Notifications using custom SendGrid templates that can include your company’s logo(s), contact details, unique color schemes, and more.

To set up the Route Scheduled Notifications, first, go to “Notification Settings” from the navigation menu.

After that, go to the “Notifications” tab from the menu on the left and then enable the Route Scheduled Notifications by checking the “Scheduled” box.

Next, enable the preferred notification types (E-Mail, SMS Messaging, and Voice Call) by clicking on the corresponding icons. Then, use the “Earliest Notification (Local Time)” and the “Latest Notification (Local Time)” fields to define the preferred custom time window for each notification type.

After that, in the “E-mail” tab, you can define the text/message for the E-Mail Notifications that will be sent to the customers associated with the corresponding dispatched route. Use the “From” field to add the sender of the E-Mail Notifications and the “Subject” field to add the subject of the E-Mail Notifications.

To use placeholders for retrieving one or multiple particular Route4Me fixed attributes (i.e., order numbers, customers’ names, estimated arrival times, etc.), and insert them into your notifications, input the corresponding placeholders (in curly braces) into the “Message” field together with the custom message text. You can find the list of all available placeholders and learn how to use them on this page. For more convenience, when you input placeholders into your notification messages, the correct placeholders are highlighted in green color, and the incorrect ones are highlighted in red color.

To fully accommodate the particular needs of your business or unique business model, Route4Me enables you to customize your Route Scheduled E-Mail Notifications using custom SendGrid templates. To use a custom SendGrid template for your E-Mail Notifications, first, make sure that SendGrid is selected as your Service Provider and that the corresponding Service Providers Configurations are adjusted accordingly in the “Advanced” settings (learn more). Next, insert the preferred template ID from your SendGrid account into the “Template ID” field.

Using SendGrid templates allows you to create fully custom designs for your E-Mail Notifications that can include your company’s logo(s), contact details, unique color schemes, and more.

When the “Template ID” field is empty, you can use the “Default Template” for sending default E-Mail Notifications, where you can adjust the following settings:

• – Greeting: The greeting phrase that is inserted at the beginning of the E-Mail Notifications (the first name ({{first_name}}) placeholder is optional);
• – Status Message: The status of the order that is displayed in the subject of the E-Mail Notifications;
• – Link to Tracking Page Message: Link to the Order Tracking Portal with the automatically inserted Order Number of the associated customer;
• – Order Info: The information about the customer’s order (the Order Number ({{order_no}}) placeholder is optional).

In the “SMS” tab, you can set up the text/message for the SMS Messaging Notifications that will be sent to all customers associated with the corresponding dispatched route.

SMS Notifications are sent out to customers as regular text messages, where you can define the contents of the text message and the sender. In addition to the custom text in your SMS notifications, you can also insert informative placeholders that retrieve data from particular Route4Me fixed attributes (i.e., order numbers, customers’ names, estimated arrival times, etc.) and automatically insert this data into your messages (learn more).

How to Dispatch Routes

To dispatch a particular route from the Routes List, in the “Approved” column, check the corresponding boxes next to the routes that you want to dispatch.

To dispatch multiple routes at a time, first, select the routes that you want to dispatch by checking the corresponding boxes, after that, go to “Operations” and then select “Approved to Execute” from the list.

To dispatch the route that is opened in the Route Editor, first, go to “Operations” and then select “Approved to Execute.” To learn more about dispatching your routes, visit this page.

Once a particular route is dispatched (Approved to Execute), all customers that are associated with this route will receive an E-Mail and/or SMS Notification(s) with the predefined messages that can contain order details, time or arrival, the data retrieved by one or multiple placeholders, and virtually any other relevant information.

All notification types are sent to the customers/prospects whose contact information is defined in the “Customer” section of the corresponding route stops. The “Customer” section of each route stop can be accessed and modified using the Route Editor in real-time.