Enhanced Text Communication
We'd like to recommend some enhancements that will allow us (and other clients) more flexibility and improve the user experience around the text feature.
- Add the ability to set text capabilities, configurations, and messages at the store level
- Allow us to personalize all of the various automated text messages - order is ready, acknowledging their "here" text, auto-responses, etc. This is extremely useful since each store's pickup area and overall operation is different.
- Come up with system variables that we can inject, such as "{userFirstName} {userLastName}" in the event that we wanted to really personalize a given message such as "Welcome to Lowes Foods of Hickory! Amy F. is gathering your order and will be outside in just a few minutes". I guess that's really the only variable field I can think of at the moment!
- Set up an auto-response option against the OMW feature, which can be enabled or disabled at store level and the message can be personalized. This is useful, especially since we may want to respond with something like "Great, we see you're on your way. Please text the word HERE when you arrive blah blah"
- Allow us to configure/personalize both the timing and the message between when they text HERE and when we auto-reply for a non-response (i.e. when noone sees the iPads or whatever). Because each store varies, we may need a different message by store as to what they should do next. For example, at a store that has posted arrival phone numbers, we'd say "It looks like our team is busy shopping orders - please call us at XXX.XXX.XXXX so we can get their attention", and so on."
Some of these are already planned and in-progress.
In-progress is the ability to define store level overrides for all the system level auto-responses and notifications.
Also planned is the ability to pre-define message templates with injectable attributes. We envision that these templates would be defined in Command Center communications center and would be available from the chat client in the application.