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How are you using customer notifications to set expectations?

Gwen Albright

We've been running FieldPulse for about 18 months now, and I keep coming back to customer notifications as the single highest-leverage thing we can tweak.

Here's what we do now:

  • Dispatch confirmation immediately after booking
  • 24-hour reminder with technician name and photo
  • "En route" trigger when status flips to In Transit
  • Completion summary with next steps

The "en route" one has been massive for us. Customers stop calling dispatch to ask "where's my tech?" — down maybe 70% from where we were.

But I'm curious what others are doing. Are you customizing the message copy? We tried being more casual and saw mixed results. What about SMS vs. email preferences? We default to SMS but I'm wondering if certain customer segments would rather get email.

Also — and this is where I'd love to hear from the ops managers here — are you using notifications to handle the negative stuff too? Like delays, reschedules, tech running late? We tend to call for that, but I'm wondering if a well-worded text actually lands better than a human calling to apologize.

Would love to hear what's working. This feels like an underexplored lever.

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  • Such a great conversation here! I love seeing how everyone's thinking about the full customer journey.

    A few things we want to make sure you're aware of — we recently published Getting the Most Out of FieldPulse Checklists which includes some guidance on customer-facing touchpoints, and there's a deeper dive on notification timing in our help center if anyone wants to explore further.

    We'd also love to hear if anyone's experimenting with the customer portal in conjunction with notifications. Are you driving people to self-serve, or keeping everything push-based?

    Feel free to DM me if you'd like to connect directly — we're always looking for feedback on what's working in the field!

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  • Such a great conversation here! I love seeing how everyone's thinking about the full customer journey.

    A few things we want to make sure you're aware of — we recently published Getting the Most Out of FieldPulse Checklists which includes some guidance on customer-facing touchpoints, and there's a deeper dive on notification timing in our help center if anyone wants to explore further.

    We'd also love to hear if anyone's experimenting with the customer portal in conjunction with notifications. Are you driving people to self-serve, or keeping everything push-based?

    Feel free to DM me if you'd like to connect directly — we're always looking for feedback on what's working in the field!

Children
  • in reply to Carla Jimenez (Staff)

    so what i did was basically try the portal for like two months and then shut it off lol

    customers would get the notification, click through, then call anyway because the portal didn't show what they actually wanted to know — like is this going to fix my problem or just diagnose it. they could see appointment time and tech name fine, but that's not what they were anxious about

    so we went back to just texts with a direct reply number that goes to dispatch. way simpler. customers seem happier.

    portals are great for some things maybe but for our customers it was just another thing to confuse them

  • in reply to Carla Jimenez (Staff)

    Quick data point: we A/B tested SMS vs. email for our commercial accounts. Email won decisively — 40% higher open rates, and fewer "wrong number" bounces.

    • Residential: SMS default, opt-in to email
    • Commercial: Email default, SMS as backup

    Worth the segment split if you have the customer data clean enough to execute.