With Shopmonkey Message Center, you can have access to all your conversations in one place. You can create new conversations, reply to previous messages, create internal notes, attach photos, and archive conversations making communication with your customer streamlined and easy. Message Center is available for Clever subscriptions and above.

To open the message center, click the message icon at the top of any page. This will open the message center from the right side of your screen.

When you open Message Center for the first time, you might notice a screen that tells you that you are all caught up on your messages. Click New Message to start a new conversation or view archived messages.

After using the Message Center, opening it will show a list of conversations. You can open general conversations you’ve had with the customer or conversations about a specific order. A general conversation will have General under the name of the customer, and a conversation about a specific order will have the order number and vehicle under the customer name.

At the top of the conversation list, you will see the search bar. Search by vehicle, customer name, and work order number to bring up conversations. Filters will help you to display only specific messages. You can filter by Topics, Read Status, Archive Status, and Received. Clicking on any conversation will let you view that conversation.

To start a new conversation, click the blue plus button above the list. Enter the name of the customer in the search field and select the customer you would like to start the conversation with. The new conversation will open, and you can begin sending messages to the customer.

To send a message to a customer, type in the area at the bottom of the conversation, and any previous messages will show above that. Each conversation will start with the Message tab selected. These messages will be sent to the customer and be visible to everyone that has access to the conversation. You can also switch it to the Internal note tab. These messages will not be sent to customers and will only be visible to people in your shop that have access to the conversation.

Use the toggles to send the message via SMS, Email, or both. It will use their preferred contact method and primary contact info from their customer details.

Click on the paper clip icon to attach photos or documents that will be useful for your customer.

The icon next to the paper clip is the Template icon. Click on that to select from the pre-made templates or custom templates your shop has created.

When reviewing your messages to customers, you can see if the messages were sent, delivered, failed to send, or were read by looking at the icons at the top of the message.

Note: Read status will only be shown for emails not for SMS.

To mention and notify another person in your shop first, make sure you’re on an Internal Note. Then type @ followed by the name of the person. You’ll notice that as you type, a list of the users in your shop will appear. Select the person from the list and complete the Internal Note. When the Internal Note is sent, the person will receive a notification.

Each user can choose their own notifications for messages like when a message is received from a customer, when a message is sent to a customer by a teammate, or when an internal note is added. If a user is being notified when an internal note is added then you can mention them and they will receive a notification.

Note: When mentioning a user, all users in the shop will receive a notification if they have the internal note notification enabled. In addition, the user will see themselves mentioned in the notification.

An Archived conversation means you don’t expect any more messages to be sent to the customer. Archived messages are not deleted and can be reopened later. To archive a conversation, just click the icon to the right of the conversation header. To reopen the message, click Reopen Now in the archived message, or simply send a new message.

Bulk Actions let you select and update multiple messages at once. To open Bulk Actions just click on the checkbox at the top of the conversations list. From there click on any message to select it. You can use the checkbox at the top to select all messages or deselect all messages. After you have the messages selected click Bulk Actions to select the action you want to take. You can mark all of the selected messages as Unread or Read, or you can Archive all of the selected messages. Bulk Actions can save you time by letting you perform actions on multiple messages at once.

Still have questions? Feel free to reach out to us through the Chat Icon in the bottom right corner of your screen. Thanks for reading!