How do I set up automatic 'technician en route' SMS to customers?

Question

Hi everyone! Our team is trying to get better about keeping customers in the loop, and I was wondering if there's a way to automatically send an SMS when our technician marks themselves as "en route" in the mobile app? We want customers to know someone's actually coming and not stuck wondering if we're still showing up.

Right now our techs are calling or texting manually and it's just not consistent — some forget, some are driving when they remember, etc. We really need this to be automatic once they tap that button!

Is this something built in or do we need to set up something special? Also can we customize what the message says? Our customers are mostly residential so we want it to sound friendly but professional. Thanks so much!

Priya Nair (Staff) · Accepted Answer

Happy to help, Deja! Yes, this is built into FieldPulse — you'll want to set up Technician Arrival Notifications in your account settings.

Here's how to enable it:

Go to Settings → Notifications → Customer Notifications
Toggle on "Notify customer when technician is en route"
Choose your delivery method: SMS, Email, or both
Customize your message in the text box — you can use variables like {{technician_name}}, {{eta}}, and {{company_name}}
Save changes

The message sends automatically when your technician taps "En Route" in the mobile app. No manual action needed!

Pro tip: Keep the message under 160 characters if you're using SMS only — longer messages may split into two texts depending on carrier. Let me know if you need help with the template wording!

Josh Mercer · Answer

Hey Deja — seconding Priya's steps, just wanted to add something we learned the hard way. Make sure your techs have location services enabled on the mobile app, otherwise the "En Route" button might not trigger the notification properly.

We had a weird issue where one guy's phone was set to "While Using" instead of "Always" and sometimes the SMS wouldn't fire. Took us a while to track down.

Also pro tip: you can set a default buffer time for the ETA if you want. We pad ours by 10 minutes so customers aren't annoyed if traffic happens. Settings → Notifications → Advanced Options.

Gwen Albright · Answer

Deja — you can actually exclude specific job types from customer notifications. It's not super obvious where it lives. Go to Settings → Notifications → Customer Notifications → Notification Rules (small link, easy to miss). From there you can create a rule that says "Don't send en route notifications for job type = Internal Training." But honestly — and this is how we run our shop — we just made an "Internal" customer record and assign internal jobs to that customer. No notifications fire because there's no real phone number. Way simpler than managing rules, and it keeps our reporting cleaner too.