The text a customer gets
When a technician starts a job, the customer gets a text saying who is coming and when, with an arrival window worked out from the technician’s live location at that moment. It sounds simple. The hard part is the phone in the van: with no signal, the start can reach the ERP hours later, and once a customer got “on the way” six hours late, minutes before the job finished. So before sending, the sender checks how late the update arrived and skips anything more than an hour old. An hour, because the start is stamped when the van leaves and real drives here run to about fifty five minutes.
The working demo of this system opens on a desktop screen. Here is how it works:
How it works
- 01Technician sets offPressing one button on the field app starts it.
- 02Late sync guardIf the update reaches the ERP hours late, no text goes out.
- 03Customer gets a textWho is coming and roughly when.
- 04Reply matchedThe answer is tied back to the customer, the job and the order.
- 05Slack is toldDispatch sees it where they already are.
- 06AcknowledgedThe row clears from the dashboard without a reload.
The reply, matched and seen
Customers answer those texts like any other: a gate code, a request to call first. A webhook receives each reply, matches it to the customer, the job and the order, posts it to Slack, and lists it on a dispatch dashboard inside the ERP until someone acknowledges it. The original outgoing text is kept on the job, so dispatch sees exactly what the customer is answering.
Priority dispatch requests, and every comment on them, post to their own Slack channel too, because the dispatcher’s phone was always ringing.
Leads that arrive on their own
Leads from Angi and Facebook used to be copied in by hand. Now they come through into NetSuite with their source attached, and Angi’s fee for each lead with them. Facebook leads are matched on the lead’s own ID rather than the email, because I noticed a returning customer with a new enquiry was being dropped as a duplicate.
Keeping the account healthy
I also went through the old scripts I inherited, fixed the bugs that had been failing quietly, and stabilised the system. Five of them are written up in Five quiet bugs in scripts I inherited.
Systems inside it
- Two-way customer texts with a live arrival window
- A guard so no text arrives after the technician
- Slack connector for replies and priority dispatch
- Angi and Facebook lead connectors into NetSuite
- Bugs in inherited scripts fixed, system stabilised