Communications Management

Communications – Managed by Propeller

Propeller puts communications front and centre of keeping your clients up to date and in control with their servicing requirements.

These powerful tools to enable your organisation to send job reminders, servicing reminders, documents and more to your customers, including additional internal messaging systems.

GDPR

Propeller is fully GDPR compliant and allows management of GDPR preferences either via our “GDPR Bulk Edit” tool – or on a property by property basis.

For a given property, in the “View Property” page, the users contact preferences can be amended for each communication type –

• Work Matters
• Service Reminders
• Marketing

With each of these having individual preferences for Emails, SMS, Phone and Letter

The bulk GDPR tool allows these to be set for a bulk set of properties.

Template Management 

The first step in using Propeller’s communications functionality is to setup and customize “Templates” for your texts, emails and letters.

Several system pre-set templates will be available – these can be amended by clicking on the required template and then pressing “Edit” – located to the bottom right.

Alternatively, new templates can be created via “Add New Template”.

To add a new template:

• Select the reminder type:
  1. Service Reminder
     • For appliance service reminders
  2. Job reminder
     • For booked visit reminders
  3. Send Document
     • For sending documents to a client
  4. Engineer on-way SMS
     • For sending on-way SMS messages to clients
• Then select the template type:
  1. Email
  2. Letter
  3. Text Message
• Template Name is the name of this template which is internal only
• Subject – this is the email / text subject
• Template Content
  1. This is where you type the content of your email, letter or text – note that texts cost 8p per text and there is a 160-character limit per text, while you can over this limit – it will increase the text costs e.g. a 200 character template will be 2x 8p texts
  2. To auto-insert fields such as the clients name, propeller references – etc, you can use the pre-set fields on the left-hand side.
     • These are used by dragging them into the template content box, where they will be inserted at your cursor location
     • Once completed, you can then select to make this a default template for that reminder
     • Click “Insert” to complete

Bulk Communications

There are two external bulk communication options within Propeller:

• Service Reminders
• Job Reminders

Service Reminders allow you to bulk-send appliance service reminders using set of filters, for example, all appliances for all properties that are due next month.

The filtering options allow to filter by:

• The property type
• The appliance type
• Date options
  1. Last Serviced Date
  2. Reminder Due Date
  3. Target Service Date
  4. Service Deadline
• And a date range
  
  

Once the required filters have been selected, and “Load” clicked – this will load all the appliances/properties that match the search.

You can then select what you wish to send – emails, letters or texts – and the template you wish to use.

 This takes account of the properties GDPR preferences as explained above, if a property has opted out of one or all these options – it will not be included in the communication.

Job Reminders allow to bulk-send booked visit reminders to clients. For example, you could use this tool to bulk-send SMS for visits tomorrow.

Job reminders allow you to filter by:

• Service Type
  1. E.g. Gas
• Service Activities
  1. E.g. Service
• Visit Number
• Include Unconfirmed Visits

Send Documents:

Propeller allows you to send documents directly to your clients through the system.

Within each Visit or Job, there is an “Email Documents” option.

Clicking this allows the selection of the required documents, for example, an LGSR and an Invoice – the selection of the email address to send this to (free type or from the Property/Landlord contacts details)

Internal Communication:

You can send Internal Communications to both your organisations Web Users and Engineers using the “Messages” functionality found under the “Communications” menu icon.

A message can be sent to single or multiple, engineers and/or administrators using by pressing “New Message” and selecting the users to send the message to.

 You can either send the message “from now” – or activate it from a certain date.

The message will appear on the user’s mobile device or propeller dashboard when activated.

You can see if the message was read by viewing the “Sent” menu and clicking on the message.

Users that have not read will have a “Grey” status, and those that have will show “Green”:

Audit Trail: 

When documents or a bulk communication is sent using Propeller – this action is logged in the “Notepad” (Propeller’s Audit Trail log).
 This logs the document(s)/communication that was sent, when it was sent and by which user.

In addition, a PDF document is created for each type of communication sent, containing all information relating to the communication (content, email addresses, mobile numbers – etc)

These are created as (depending on the type of communication):

• Communications Emails
• Communications Texts
• Communications Letters