It has been asked:

I see emails showing up on customers, contracts, leads, tickets, and estimates - and sometimes when customers email us it goes to any of those places! Explain please.

You are right to wonder!

This is an evolution currently that is about 80% complete. (Updated at Aug 2016)

In the old days, you could get leads inbound with any email to subdomain@reply.repairshopr.com and you could email people from tickets. If a customer replied to a ticket comment, that would add a note to the ticket and could notify you if you have a rule in the notification center.

We made some updates this summer that greatly enhanced our ability to track emails and get replies into the correct place.

Now you are able to send an email from many places in the app—the Customer detail page, Leads, Contracts, Estimates, Invoices, and Tickets.

When a customer replies to any of these, the reply will be threaded back to where it came from.

If you send an invoice to a customer, and they reply, it makes sense that the reply would be on the Invoice in question.

You want to be able to see that this happened, so we put them at the top of the page in a small email widget - and you can also use the notification center to be notified of any replies.

On to the "Three Way Email"

We are working toward all emails in our software being "Three Way" - which we define as:

1. You can email a customer something from the app
2. They can reply to that email and you get the reply (as well as in our software)
3. You can reply to the reply notification from #2, and they get that reply (and they can reply to that, etc.)

Currently all those places except tickets are Three Way enabled. You go into notification center and make a rule to be emailed when a reply comes in, and it's ready to go. Now when a customer replies, you get an email - and you can reply to that email to update the system and that will also email the customer back. It works in all the areas except tickets.

We have a pretty extensive email system already going on in tickets, and we wanted to make those changes gradually - so the ticket system email updates are still not finished.

What you can do with a ticket

Email a customer, the customer can reply to that, and you can get a notification that they replied.

If you reply to the outbound email or the reply notification from the customer - that will be attached to the ticket as a public comment currently and will be sent to the customer just like it you commented via the web.

Note: Outgoing emails may contain attachments with a total combined size of up to 30 MB due to limitations with our email provider. Beyond 30 MB, you may notice that not all attachments show up in your customer's inbox, or the message may not be delivered at all.

A note on SMS

SMS can be sent from a ticket update, and they have 2 features.

The customer can reply "A" to approve a repair, and anything they reply will be attached to the ticket.

There is a restriction on how we handle this though.

The mobile number they reply from must only exist on one customer, and that customer must have only 1 open ticket.

If you have the number duplicated, or they have multiple tickets, they get a message asking them to call you.