The Customer Portal not only gives you a way of giving your customers access to view information, it also gives you the ability to direct message a customer on a job or quote and for a customer to communicate back to you saving valuable admin time.
What you can do?
Send a message to a customer on a Job or Quote
Customers can send messages to you via the Portal against a job or Quote
Have a visual indication when a new message has been received
How It works
How customers add a message
Customers can login to the portal and go into a job or quote > go to files and notes > add a new message. Customers also need to ensure that they select "Message" and not a note. Notes will save against the job but they will not notify you of a new message whereas the "message" option will let you know.
What you see in office
When a new portal message comes in, from the job or quotes list you will see the message counter go up in your list of statuses to show someone has added a new message
You will also see a message speach icon to the left of the job name that you can hover over. This will display a quick view of the message and provide a quick link to get to the message
Responding to the message
Responding to a message is simple and can be done from within the files and notes section of any Job or Quote. Simply go into files and notes > select Portal communication and write a message
What customers see when you send the message
Similar to in office, customers see the message counter go up and can click this to filter out just Jobs or Quotes with messages attached
Customers will also see a message message icon to the left of the job name that you can hover over. This will display a quick view of the message and provide a quick link to get to the message
Customers can then respond by going to the files and notes section of the Job or Quote (or by clicking "Go to notes" in the quick view pop up) and repeating the process.