NOTE:
Your long-term (service follow-up) reminders contain information you want to go out to the customer on a particular service AFTER they receive the service.
You can build out and send up to four (4) long-term reminders for every single one of your services.
Note: If you're on the Enterprise plan, you can build and send up to eight (8) long-term reminders for each service.
IMPORTANT: Once a job is marked "Completed," these reminders will deploy at the times you've selected regardless if that customer books another service with you or not. So, if you have a reminder message that says "It's been 12 weeks since your last service..." that message will deploy at the 12 week mark whether or not the customer has booked additional work leading up to that 12 week point. It might a good idea to slightly alter the wording of your messages so as not to confuse the customer in this way.
Explanation for this: With any feature in Urable we can error on the side of customization or automation. When you have more automation, we can only allow for so much customization. When you have more customization, we can only allow for so much automation. It's like a push and a pull. With long-term reminders we opted for more customization and because we don't know what you are going to say in those messages we can't decide which messages should be turned off based on what appointments are booked. As noted above, a good way to handle this issue is to add a note to the bottom of each message to disregard if the service is already scheduled or completed.
Setting up your long-term (service follow-up) reminders:
go to your Products/Services page in the side menu
click into a 'Category' and then into a 'Service'
click "Reminders" across the top of the page
click 'edit' to build out your message(s)
choose SMS (text) or Email (note the character count limits of each....you will be able to build out much longer messages with email)
toggle on "Automatic Deployment"
choose when you want this message to be deployed hours/days/weeks/months/years after the job has been marked "Completed"
create your customizable message
choose from a list of dynamic fields to include if you'd like [customer name, item name (this is the vehicle); business phone number; etc.]
do this to make it seem more personal without having to personalize each one
build out long-term reminders once and then 'Copy' to other services, making minor adjustments, if needed
Suggestions for information/links within these messages:
communicate certain information to the customer:
they can now wash their vehicle
they need to bring their vehicle in for an assessment
they need to apply a product to their vehicle
they need to bring their vehicle back to the shop for routine maintenance
link to specific services on your Virtual Shop that you'd like customers to book
link to specific products on your Virtual Shop that you sell related to the service they received
link to a Youtube (or other) video that shows how to perform certain maintenance on their vehicle or how to use a product they purchased from you
IMPORTANT: automate the entire process of following up with the customer and then linking to your virtual shop to book future service appointments/purchase products
once you put this in place it's like a never-ending cycle of services and reminders
Examples of long-term (service follow-up) messages:
'IN SHOP' AND 'IN FIELD' LONG-TERM REMINDER MESSAGES:
For the services that you offer "in shop" AND "in field" and want to send unique messages based on the job type:
if your follow up reminders will differ a bit based on whether the job is 'in shop' or 'in field,' here is how you set up unique follow-up reminders:
in "Job Type" select 'in shop' (it defaults to whatever you've selected in Preferences)
create your message and click the green checkmark to "Save"
in "Job Type" select 'in field'
create your message and click the green checkmark to "Save"
*NOTE: Now you will be able to select either 'in shop' or 'in field' from the drop-down to see each of these messages (See screenshot).
A NOTE ABOUT SETTING UP LONG-TERM REMINDERS GLOBALLY
once you set up your long-term reminders for a service, these will not apply retroactively to previously created (scheduled but not completed) jobs but only to jobs created moving forward. Here's how you can apply them to previously created jobs: