We previewed a great new feature at the Scaling New Heights conference last week called "Reminders", and I'm happy to announce this is now live in all Method accounts.  If you turn Reminders on in your account, Method will send you an email 15 minutes before your activity is due, along with a link that takes you straight into that activity in Method.

What's better, you can also have reminders sent to your mobile phone as an SMS text message, which logs you in directly to the new mobile activity screen in Method Mobile.

How to turn reminders on

By default, as of today, new Method accounts have Reminders turned on - but all existing Method accounts have Reminders turned off.  To turn Reminders on or off, do the following:

1. Go to Customize > Tables / Fields.
2. Find the Activity table, and click the Edit Table link.
3. Place a check in the Email me reminders for records in this table before they are due checkbox.
4. Click Save & Close.

How to turn reminders on and off per user

Note: you must turn this feature on for the account first, otherwise these settings will be ignored (see "How to turn reminders on" above)

1. Go to Customize > Users.
2. Click Edit beside the user you want to change Reminder settings for.
3. Advance to step 3 of 10 (yes there are more exciting steps in Customize > Users now....that's another blog post!).
4. Place a check in the Send email reminders before they are due checkbox.  This will deliver them a regular email reminder.
5. Place a check in the Send SMS alerts before they are due checkbox. This will send a text message to their mobile phone.
6. Type their mobile phone number in (all 10 digits in North America).
7. Choose your wireless provider from the list.
8. Click Finish.

How to customize the format of what gets sent

There are a bunch of options you can set to customize how your Reminders are sent.

1. Go To Customize > Tables / Fields.
2. Find the Activity table, and click the Edit Table link.
3. Notice here that you can edit the regular email template, the SMS template, as well as which Tab Links you want the links to send you to.
4. Click Save & Close.

Okay, so what's the logic going on behind the scenes?

In order to qualify for a reminder, a CRM activity must be assigned to an Activity Status that causes reminders AND ALSO be assigned to an Activity Type that causes reminders. You can edit these by clicking the "..." button next to the Activity Type and Activity Status dropdown lists, and selecting which types and statuses have "Causes Reminder" selected. 

For example, you wouldn't want to be emailed a reminder for an activity that already had a completed status!  Also, you may just want to be reminded for Meeting and not Phone Calls.

15 minutes before an activity is due, an email gets sent to your mobile phone.  In fact, in reality what really happens is that 20 minutes before an activity is due it gets put into an email queue, with delivery set 5 minutes later - I mention this because you might find that an activity that you completed 18 minutes before it was due still sends you a reminder.  This is part of our new email queuing system that ensures that high priority emails get sent before lower priority emails.

Enjoy! This is actually just the beginning of a larger project I am working on, which will eventually involve daily digests and "follower notifications".  Yes, I just threw you a teaser of what's to come .

Paul