Method Community

Hello Forum Viewers,

We had a good question sent into our support email that we felt would be good to share and discuss with other Method users.  In my own words, the user was wondering if it is currently possible to offer sometype of alert to customers through an SMS text message, and then receive back confirmation from that customer.  The example given to us, which I will continue with, is if you had to move/change a date for a Work Order already created, to be able to alert your customer via Text Message and allow them to be respond back confirming they received this date change.

Currently, we do not have an out-of-box feature that can offer this type of service through text message.  However, this is a feature that our development team has discussed and plans to offer down the road and it shouldn't be too difficult to implement.  

I was informed about one option out there that you should be able to utilize through some customization.  There is a service, you can check out there website from this link, as the name suggests, it can convert and send out an email as a text message.  There are a some limitations with this particle service, I will name a couple off-hand, but please check them out through the link above.  You would have to know the mobile provider of your customer, and you would also have to use plain text in the email to convert it properly to a text message.

If you have set up a service like this through Method, or if you have any comments about this topic, please feel free to comment to this thread.  If we have any updates on our end, we will make sure to add to this post.

Thanks,
-Ben 

Ben,

I had a customer that wanted something similar. They wanted to text their employees the start time and location for the next day and have their employees respond to confirm.

I added a field for storing the text number for each employee. The number that would be saved was the 10 digit number plus @vtext.com (Or whichever carrier they had). All employees would be texted from the work order list screen using Method's send email action. I created a new gmail account just for the purpose of sending and receiving these texts. When an employee would reply it would be sent to this new account.

I then created a web service that would read all unread emails from this account. It would match the employees text number to their schedule and update the status to confirmed or declined based on the text body. In this case the employee neded to respond Yes or No.

When ever the person in charge of scheduling would refresh their work order list, Method would call the web service I created. It would read all the new emails since the last time and update the schedules in Method before refreshing the gird.

It was a bit of work to get setup. Having this functionality right inside Method would be nice!