- Automate Text Reminders to Employees with Job Rules
This Tutorial will show you how to setup an automation for a text to go out to an employee once a job is set to a certain status.
In this tutorial I will be focusing on the job status of Waiting for Measurement, but this process will work for any of the job statuses located on the Job Rules Maintenance Page.
When it comes to automation in MarketSharp it will always be the same three step process. The steps are the following.
- Create a Template
- Create an Activity Process
- Attach the Activity Process to an Automation Rule
Starting with the first step, we will create a text template that we wish the employee to receive. To create a template, go to the Admin Page and look for the link for MarketSharp Text Templates.
Located at the top of this menu you will notice A box for Name, A drop down for Type and another longer box for Message.
We will always want to name a template to be something that is relevant to the task we are trying to perform, so I will name mine Waiting for Measurement Reminder. Next under the contact drop down, make sure we select Employee, because we do not want this text to go to one of our contacts. Lastly for the message, you can ideally put anything you wish into this text, however each text segment can only hold up to 160 characters before it splits into another segment so keep that in mind when creating your messages.
I kept my message simple. I just want my employee to contact (John for example) to follow up on measurements. Feel free to take advantage of the merge fields drop down so that way you are not having to always type in a customer's name or any generic information related to multiple contacts.
Make sure to hit Save when you are finished with your text template and then go back to the admin page.
We have finished step one and now we will move on to step two which to create an activity process.
Navigate to the link for Activity Process.
On the Activity Process Maintenance Page click Add Process.
Once the new window opens you will see a blank activity process already created. Now we just need to change some things on this process to do what we want it to do.
Change the Following:
- Type - Text Out
- Assign to - Current User
- Text Template - To the text template you just created
Make sure to name this process and Save. Step two is now finished. On to Step Three.
The last step is to set the Automation Rules for our activity process to automate itself. In order to do this, the activity process needs to be triggered once something happens in MarketSharp. In this case we want this activity process to trigger for the job status of Waiting for Measurement. This means that once this job status is selected and saved, our text activity will now trigger and we can send our text to our employee to contact that customer.
To setup this automation let's go to the admin page once more and we will navigate to the link for Job Rules
On the Job Rules Maintenance Page we will see that you have all the job statuses and each has a drop down list for us to attach an activity process to. Click on the drop down for the drop down under Waiting for Measurement and choose the activity process we created in step two and save. Step Three is now complete and your automation is now setup.
The next thing to do is to test it out to make sure everything works. To do this, create a fake customer record (if you have not already) and lets add a job to this record.
Once you have a job created under this contact, let now edit this job by clicking on the blue pencil located on the right of the screen.
Under the Job Status drop down, choose Waiting For Measurement and then save it.
Now you will see another window pop up and it will contain our text out activity process that we created.
All you have to do now is choose the Send Date/Time and then under the To drop down, choose which employee you want to send this text to, hit save your text will be sent to that employee at the set date/time.
This is how to automate a text to be sent to an employee based on Job Rules.
Some key notes here:
- You can also just add a process of text out to an existing activity process if you wish, just make sure to choose that activity process when you go to the Job Rules Maintenance Page.
- If the employee does not show in the TO drop down then make sure you have a cell number listed for them under the Employee Maintenance Page ( this is located on the Admin Page).