These are reminders to your crew about jobs they are due to run. They are not the reminders that chase customers for money; those are payment reminders and they live somewhere else entirely.
Everything here is on Reminder Settings, which configures crew job reminders, quiet hours, and notification channels.
1 Turn them on
The first control is Enable Crew Reminders, which turns reminders on or off for all crew members at once.
This is the master switch. Everything below only matters once it is on.
2 Pick the channels
Reminders can go by email, by SMS, or both.
SMS is what actually gets read by someone in a truck. Email is what gets read the night before. Both together works, but be aware texts consume your plan’s SMS allowance, so on a large crew with several reminders each this adds up faster than you would think.
If you are watching your SMS allowance, a good compromise is one text close to the job and email for anything earlier.
3 Set the intervals
The intervals control sends reminders at these intervals before the scheduled job time. You pick how many hours ahead.
Two is usually plenty: one the evening before, so people can plan their morning, and one an hour or two ahead as the actual prompt.
More than that and the reminders stop being information and start being noise, at which point crews mute them and you have lost the channel entirely.
4 Set quiet hours
Quiet hours have a start time and an end time, and no reminders will be sent during these hours.
Set these before you turn reminders on, not after. A 5am text to a crew member who does not start until eight is exactly the kind of thing that makes people turn notifications off for your app permanently, and you will not get that back easily.
Pick a window that covers genuine off-hours for your operation. If your first job is at seven, quiet hours ending at six gives an hour of useful warning without waking anybody.
5 Save
Click Save Settings.
A sensible starting configuration
- Reminders on
- Channel: SMS
- Intervals: one the evening before, one about two hours ahead
- Quiet hours: from early evening until an hour before your earliest start
Then leave it alone unless people complain. The measure of a good reminder setup is that nobody mentions it, because everybody turns up.
Why bother
A crew member who forgets a job costs you more than the job. It costs the customer relationship, and in a business built on recurring work a lost customer is a lost season, not a lost visit.
Reminders are cheap insurance against the most preventable failure in the business.