23.12 Release Notes

Send SMS Messages to your Customers via LMN

Note: SMS Functionality is available to all LMN Pro and Pro+ users. Since a payment card on file is required to initialize SMS verification, the feature is not available to Free Trial users.

In the green industry, it’s important to approach each week with a customer service mindset. We’ve heard from lots of LMN contractors who are keeping the conversation going by:

• Sending a reminder that a visit is happening the following day, so that the property owner/manager can make sure (for e.g.) any gates are unlocked and pets are indoors for the duration of the work;
• Sending a post-visit follow-up letting the customer know that work has been completed on the property. As a contractor, this is also a great opportunity to share a satisfaction survey link if you’re interested in gathering feedback.
• Sending a reschedule notice if a visit was postponed or moved, letting the customer(s) know about the new scheduled date.

Keeping customers looped in can take a lot of work if you’re doing it manually. With this release, we’re making it easier by introducing two new ways to send text messages to your customers via LMN.

Set Up and Verify your SMS Messaging within LMN

Getting your LMN account all set up to send SMS notifications is easy:

1. Under Settings, open the ‘SMS Notifications’ screen. From here, select a payment plan that will allow headroom for the number of SMS messages your company is likely to send within a typical month. Next, click the ‘Purchase’ button.
2. Confirm your first SMS payment and verify your payment details. Upon clicking the “Pay” button, you will be charged your first monthly plan charge, as well as a $75 USD Activation Fee. This fee helps cover the cost of verifying your account and setting up the phone number that will be used to send your LMN-powered SMS messages.
3. At this point, we’ll ask you for some company-level details that we need to complete SMS verification.
4. Finally, choose a phone number that you would like to use as the number from which your LMN account’s outgoing SMS messages are sent.

After you’re done proceeding through all the steps of the ‘Set up SMS Messaging’ modal, it’s time to wait for us to complete verification on the LMN side. This will take up to five days. When it’s done, we’ll let you know via email.

Build and Organize Templates for your SMS Messages

After you’ve passed verification and are all set up to send SMS messages with LMN, head to the SMS Notifications screen in Settings. Here you’ll see some suggested templates from us, for some very common messaging scenarios.

To add your own templates, click the green “+” button at the bottom right corner of the screen.
Using the same form message for all of your customers can leave a bad impression, so we’ve also included a powerful Personalize tool that you can use to insert tokens into a templated message. For example, if your customer is Lucy Smith, “Hi {{CONTACT_FIRST_NAME}}” in your template will turn into “Hi Lucy” in the message that Lucy sees.
Utilizing the templates you create here will be a big time-saver whether you’re sending SMS messages via automation, or in bulk via the Job List (more on both of these delivery methods below).

Bulk-send an SMS to a Selection of Customers

There are three different screens where you can send an SMS message in bulk to a selection of your customers:

• Whiteboard offers two ways to send:
• Use the checkboxes to select a number of visits (or use ‘Select All Visits’ under the ‘Whiteboard Actions’ dropdown). A ‘Send SMS’ button will appear at the top right of the page — you can click this to open up the message composition modal. Useful for visit reminders!
• When performing a ‘Shift Dates’ operation you can also turn on a toggle that, after performing the shift operation, will open the ‘Send To’ SMS composition modal, with the affected visits’ contacts as the message recipients. This will save lots of time if you need to advise a large group of customers that their scheduled visits were postponed due to, for e.g., a major weather event.
• Schedule Review: Use the checkboxes to make a selection of visits then the ‘Send SMS’ button to send a templated message to those contacts. Doing so from Schedule Review will be especially helpful if you want to send reminders/notices to all the visits associated with a specific service.
• Job List: Use the checkboxes to select one or more jobs from the list, then click the new ‘Send SMS’ option under the ‘Update Jobs’ dropdown. Useful for when you want to send an SMS to a grouping of customers whose visits won’t be scheduled by your team (e.g. messaging snow customers in advance of a weather event)
• Job Info and Settings (default view for a single Job): under the ‘Action’ menu, you’ll now find a ‘Send SMS’ option. This will be useful if you just want to send a one-off templated message to the contact for that job.
• Timesheet Daily Review
• Use the checkboxes to make a selection of visits, then click the ‘Send SMS’ button now found in the top right corner of the screen.

Simply use the checkboxes to select the visits/jobs that you want to message the associated customers for. On each of these pages there will now be a ‘Send SMS’ button (NOTE: on the Job List it will be one of the options in the ‘Update Job’ dropdown'). Clicking this will open up a ‘Send To’ modal that you can use to:

• Review the list of recipients who will receive this message; add in any missing phone numbers; or delete individuals from the recipient list
• Write and refine the contents of your message
• Add in personalization tokens
• Apply one of your Templates

Click the green ‘Send’ button and you’re all done! The message should be on its way to your customers’ cell phones.

After sending the message, you will be taken to a final page that will read out a list of any customers who you attempted to send this SMS message to, but did not receive it for any reason (e.g. invalid phone number, or previously opted out of receiving SMS messages from your business).

NOTE: The first LMN-generated SMS message that a customer receives from you will be preceded by a standardized opt-in message with the following text: ‘Hi [first name] this is [company name], thanks for working with us. We'll send you notifications for your upcoming and completed services, estimates, and invoices. Message and data rates may apply. Message frequency varies. To opt-out reply STOP at any time.'

Check a customer’s Communication History to see sent SMS Messages

Have a customer claiming that they did not receive your SMS message before or after a visit? All SMS messages sent via LMN will automatically be captured within your Communication History for that customer, so you can cross-reference with ease.

Reward Crews’ productivity with Efficiency Scoring and Efficiency Goals

As an Operations Manager, one of the best ways to help your company stay profitable is by making sure that your teams are minimizing the time they spend on ‘unbillable’ work such as travel, loading, and material pickup. For the first time ever in LMN, timesheet reviewers can see a live readout of a team’s ‘Efficiency Score’ during the day — a percentage that indicates how much of the work they performed was billable (or productive).

Of course, what counts as high-efficiency performance will look different from crew to crew, depending on factors like the the geographical size of routes (some routes require driving longer distances) or the type of work being performed (some jobs require more truck loading). You can use Efficiency Goals to set expectations. To set up an Efficiency Goal for a Crew Lead, find them in the LMN Settings ‘Staff Screen’ and navigate to the Goals tab (where you currently go to set Revenue Goals):
Now, when you review a timesheet that was submitted by that Crew Lead, right at the top you’ll be able to see their Efficiency Score for that sheet, as well as how it stacks up against the goal you set for that Lead:

Print-Friendly LMN Calendar

Need to print off your weekly or monthly calendar to share with a crew, or review in an Operations meeting? Look for our new Print button on our Calendar view — you can use it to generate a printed schedule that shows you all your visits, without any over-spilling the page.