Geofence Departed – Customer Alerting and Notifications

Route4Me’s Geofence Departed Add-On allows you to automate the process of notifying your customers with E-Mail and SMS Notifications that your delivery driver, field sales rep, field service technician, or other field employee has left their location (exited the geofence set around their location or delivery address). Thus, you can adjust your geofencing and notifications settings only once, and every time your field employees depart from customers’ locations, the route optimization system will automatically send out the predefined notifications that can contain order delivery time and date, geofence-entered/departed timestamps, order tracking URL, and more. 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. Moreover, to fully accommodate the particular needs of your business or unique business model, the Route4Me fleet management and dynamic routing software also enables you to customize the design of your Geofence Departed 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 your Geofence Departed 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 Geofence Departed Notifications by checking the Geofence Left box.

Next, enable the preferred notification types (E-Mail and SMS Messaging) 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 geofence-departed route stops. 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’ name, 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. 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 Geofence Departed 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. 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 Notifications that will be sent to all customers associated with the corresponding geofence-departed route stops/addresses.

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.

How Do the Geofence Departed Notifications Work?

The Geofence Departed Notifications are sent out to the associated customers once a driver or field employee exits the geofence set around their location. The geofence-departed timestamp is displayed in the Detected as Departed field in the Address Visit Details section of the given route stop/customer address. All Detected as Departed timestamps are generated automatically by the system upon exiting the corresponding geofences. Learn more about how to set up geofences.

Once the geofence set around the location of a particular customer is exited by your team member, the corresponding customer will receive an E-Mail and/or SMS Notification(s) with the predefined message(s) 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.