Messages, email and texts

Your application can keep people informed in three ways:

• conversations on a record, between your staff and the customer the record belongs to;
• notifications, by email or inside the application, when something happens;
• text messages through your own Twilio account.

You get each of them by asking for it on Changes (see Ask for a change).

Conversations on a record

A customer usually has a question about their order, job or booking. A conversation keeps that question, and every answer, on the record itself, where anyone in the office who works on it can see it, rather than in somebody's inbox.

Ask for it like this:

• "Let customers message us about their job, and let the office and the assigned engineer reply."
• "Clients can send the salon a message about their booking, with a photo if they want."

Because this decides who can see a conversation, our team checks the change as well as you, and again whenever you add a staff role to it.

Who can see a conversation

A conversation is between the record's own customer and the staff roles you named, and nobody else.

• The customer sees only the conversations on their own records. They need to sign in to your application to take part.
• Staff see a conversation only if they can already see the record. An engineer who can only see their own jobs doesn't see the conversation on anyone else's.
• To anyone else, the conversation doesn't exist. They aren't even told there is one.
• Nobody in a role that signs in with someone else vouching for them, such as a pupil with a class code, can ever be in a conversation.

What it looks like

The record's page has a Messages link. The conversation shows each message in order, with whether it came from the customer or the team, and when. Under it are a box for Your message (up to 4,000 characters), an optional picture or PDF, and Send. A Messages page lists every conversation the person can open, newest first, with how many are unread.

New messages appear on their own while the page is open, or within about 30 seconds.

Email when there is something new

When a message is sent, the other side gets an email with a link to the conversation:

• a message from staff goes to the customer;
• a message from the customer goes to the staff who have already replied in that conversation, or, before anyone has, to the staff in the roles you named (at most 20 people).

Each person gets one email per conversation until they read it, so a busy conversation doesn't fill their inbox. The email comes from your own domain if you have set one up (see Use your own domain). It includes the message itself, except where the record holds health, financial or children's information, when it only says there is a new message.

Taking a message down

Any staff member in the conversation can press Take down on a message. It is hidden from everybody, customer and staff alike, and the conversation shows that it was taken down by staff and when. This can't be undone. Customers can't take messages down.

To keep things fair, each person can send at most 10 messages a minute and 60 an hour, and one conversation holds up to 2,000 messages.

What happens to conversations over time

A conversation is part of its record. If the record is deleted, its conversation goes with it. If the record is kept but a person's details are removed from it, the words and attachments in the conversation are erased, and only who wrote when is kept. Erasing a person erases every message they wrote. See Privacy: what is kept about people, and erasing someone.

Notifications, by email or in the application

Your application can tell people when something happens, as part of an action or a flow. For example:

• "Email the customer when their order is ready to collect."
• "When a job is marked complete, tell the office in the app."
• "Email the client a reminder the day before their appointment." (see Bookings and appointments)

There are two kinds:

• Email, to a person's email address. An email to one of your application's users only includes what they are allowed to see. An email to an address that isn't one of your application's users, such as a customer's email address typed on a record, is checked by our team as well as you.
• In-app, which appears on a notifications page inside your application, for someone who signs in to it.

The wording of each notification is part of your application. To change it, ask on Changes.

Text messages

With a Twilio account connected, your application can send a text from your own number when somebody does something in your application, such as pressing a button to say an order is ready. For example: "Add a button on a booking to text the client that we're running late." Anyone who replies STOP is never texted again, and there is a daily limit. Twilio bills you directly. How to connect it, and what it costs, is in Connect other services.

What you can't do yet

• Send a text automatically, from a flow or as a booking reminder. A text is sent when somebody does something.
• Read texts that customers send back in a conversation. Only STOP and START are read.
• Notify everyone who holds a role, such as "tell every manager". A notification goes to a person named on the record.
• Let each person choose how they are notified.
• Staff-only notes inside a conversation, or conversations that aren't about a record.
• Push notifications to a phone.