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ETA-Based Notifications

A route that starts on Monday morning and ends on Wednesday afternoon puts dispatchers in an awkward spot with customer notifications. If the message goes out when the route starts, the customer on the last stop hears about their delivery two days early. A fixed time of day doesn't help much either, since stops on the same route can be a day or more apart.

Scheduled notifications in Track-POD now have a third sending option that solves this: each message goes out a set time before the planned ETA of that customer's stop. With a one-hour offset, a customer whose delivery is planned for 8:14 gets the notification at 7:14, wherever that stop falls on the route.

ETA-based scheduling is available on the Ultimate plan.

Three ways to schedule a notification

Delivery notifications with scheduled sending now offer three options:

• Send at: a fixed time of day, the same for every order. Works well for single-day routes with predictable timing.
• Send before planned start: a set time before the route is due to start. All customers on the route are notified together.
• Send before planned ETA: a set time before the planned arrival at each stop. Every customer is notified on their own schedule, which suits long and multi-day routes.

The notification text itself doesn't change. Customers receive the template you've set up in the notifications center, only at a different moment.

Setting it up

Open Settings and go to the Notifications tab. Switch on Scheduled sending, pick one of the three options and, for the ETA-based ones, enter the offset, for example 1 hour. Then click Save.

Two more settings need to be in place before anything is sent:

• Time zone. Select the time zone your operation works in on the same screen. Without it, Track-POD can't work out when to send, and scheduled notifications won't go out.
• Ready status. Scheduled notifications are only sent for routes marked Ready. If you don't use this status yet, go to the General tab in Settings, scroll to the bottom, switch on Enable Ready status and save.

 

From planned ETA to a sent message

The ETA option relies on each stop having a planned arrival time. In Plan & Track, open the route and use one of the two buttons on it:

• Optimize finds the most efficient order of stops and calculates the ETAs.
• Calculate ETA keeps your stop order as it is and only works out the times.

Either way, an ETA column appears with the planned start of the route and the planned arrival at each order. Planned times are based on the route itself and don't account for traffic or traffic lights, so treat them as a close estimate.

When the route is ready to go, open its three-dot menu and choose Mark as Ready. From that moment, every order on the route has its notification scheduled. If the order's ETA is 8:36 and the offset is one hour, the customer receives the message at exactly 7:36.

Who benefits most

The option was built for companies whose routes run over several days, where a start-of-route message reaches some customers far too early. It also helps any operation that wants customers to hear from them a few hours ahead of the actual delivery. A well-timed message gives people a chance to be home or to arrange a neighbour, and dispatchers get fewer calls asking "Where is my order?" as a result.

Recap

With Send before planned ETA, each customer on a route is notified a set time before their own delivery. Set the offset and time zone in Settings, calculate ETAs for the route, mark it Ready, and Track-POD sends each message on time.