Messages
TIDY's Messages feature offers a shared inbox that simplifies communication between your team and your cleaning and maintenance professionals. This article explains how the feature works, integrates with other tools and enhances overall communication.
We have heard from many customers about the pain of managing communication with cleaners and maintenance people on your properties. The problems include:
- It is hard for teams to communicate as a team with cleaning & maintenance vendors. For example, what happens if your company's vendor's point of contact is on vacation?
- You want to communicate in the systems you already use (like Slack).
- Pros want to work a different way (like SMS).
Many customers have tried things like shared WhatsApp or Slack channels, but these are unwieldy and not meant for this.
TIDY's Messages feature is a "shared inbox" which centralizes all communication in jobs into TIDY. Here is how it works:
- Anyone in your team can see all messages from the pro for a specific address or job. This allows your whole team to work together seamlessly. Someone on vacation? No problem. Anyone can step in.
- You can control permissions for users, granting limited access to people as needed.
- All messages sent using TIDY's apps or connected channels are visible to all users in your account, and tagged to a job for a more detailed history. This makes looking at "what happened?" easy.
- Anyone on your pro's team can see your messages from anyone on your team, so their team shares in this benefit.
To use this feature, just tap any job, and you will see the option to message your pro. Any user on your account who can see that job, can view messages and send them.
TIDY's Messages feature also provides a clear indication of read and unread messages, making it easier for users to stay updated on the latest communication. I
How Read/Unread Messages Work
- Unread messages: Messages are marked as unread until they are viewed within the TIDY software. If you read a message on a different platform, TIDY does not track that activity, and the message will still be marked as unread within the TIDY interface. To make it easy for users to identify unread messages, they are highlighted within the TIDY interface. This visual cue ensures you can quickly spot new messages and respond accordingly.
- Read messages: Once a message is viewed in the TIDY software, it is automatically marked as read. The read status helps you and your team stay informed about which messages have been acknowledged and which still need attention.
Please note that TIDY's read/unread tracking applies only to messages viewed within the software. If you read a message on another platform, the message will still be marked as unread within TIDY. To ensure accurate read/unread status, we recommend using the TIDY platform to view and manage all your job-related communication.
You want communication tied into the tools you already use. We support Notification Integrations. Notification Integrations takes the Shared Inbox to the next level, by allowing both you and your pros to get notifications where each of you independently prefer.
We support pretty much any integration with either webhooks, open API, Zapier, and our pre-built library of integrations. So far, pros most often prefer SMS, and property managers most often prefer Slack. We support the following integrations, with more coming:
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Salesforce
- Hubspot
- Intercom
- Monday.com
- Asana
- Pipedrive
- Zoho
- Zapier
- Webhooks
- API
If you ever want a new integration, please reach out!
When can send and recieve messages for any jobs, and view these on the job itself. This is very helpful to organize communication, so you can easily see the exact context of the communication. Here are some notes on how these messages work:
- When you chat in the app, the chats appear on the job for all people who have permission to view that job.
- The other party will get an in-app notification.
- If there is only 1 person on the account, and you have a phone number, then you will get SMS notifications, and you can reply to those messages.
- You can also set up alerts to receive messages in another channel (e.g. Slack Notifications). This is a way to know that you got these messages. To send messages, you must click on go on the cleaning card that will be on the Schedule page:
They are available on the Dashboard page if you have received any messages.
And to reply, just click on the message, which will direct you to the Messages page. This page contains the entire history of conversations between the Pros and you.
Internal comments allows clients to communicate with other users who have access to the job in a private and confidential manner. Another simple way to use this system is leaving private notes and it's a great way to add important comments or notes for the job without sharing them with the Pro.
To send an internal note, click on the desired job, and select the "Internal Note" option before sending the message. Internal notes have a different style with a gray background. Only you or the users with access to the job will be able to view them.
As Pros will not be able to see any messages sent through the internal note system, use the "Public Reply" option to communicate directly with them.
