Customer and Reservation Phone List (and Batch Texting) |
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These functions, Customer Phone List and Reservation Phone List, can be used to generate a list of customers with their phone numbers. They are available in the Reports menu, but you can also get to them through the Customer menu (for Customer Phone List) and Reservations menu (for Reservation Phone List).
The same Phone List dialog may also be invoked from right-click menus on many tab views (e.g. on the Arrivals tab view, right click and select Print or E-mail for all shown reservations / Reservation E-mail List). In that case, the list will be automatically filtered/limited to those reservations/customers currently shown on the Arrivals tab view.
As with the Customer Mailing Labels report, you can use the Reservation Filtering to select various criteria for which customers to be shown. Additional options are available to only show customers that have a "valid" phone # (as per Program Options), and also to exclude customers that have the Warning flag set. If Text Messaging is enabled, then you can further filter for those who have "Textable" numbers (numbers considered valid for texting and have also been "opted in" for texting through Customer Details)
Color coding
If a phone number is not considered "valid" according to your settings in Program Options, then it will be shown in a light grey color. If you have Texting enabled, then it will highlight valid phone numbers that are "opted in" (through the "T" check boxes on Customer Details) in a green background, indicating that those are the only numbers that will receive batch text messages.
Sending Texts (Batch Texting)
Besides just getting a list of customer phone numbers to print or export, this dialog is used to batch-send Texts to the list. You can select one or more customers to Text (highlight the rows as usual), or send to the entire list (the default when none are selected). Of course this assumes that you have done the Text Messaging Setup so that texting from Campground Master is possible, and that your Access Level allows sending Texts to multiple customers.
When texting is set up and enabled, you will have some additional options available:
•Text form -- this drop-down list allows you to select which Form to send (and in some cases a "blank" option allows you to send a free-form Text, which you will type in after clicking Send). The Form selections depend on the situation (e.g. Customer vs Reservation forms), and the available forms depends on the enabled Text Forms defined in the Forms Setup.
•Edit Form -- if the Form selected above is a custom form, and if you have sufficient operations access, then this button will appear so you can make last-minute changes to the form if needed (through Edit Form Definition).
•Transactions to Show... selections -- if a form is selected that contains a transactions table, e.g. the Text Receipt, then you will have the typical options for what transactions to include just like for printing receipts.
•Preview each text message -- If this is selected, every Text will be shown so you can view and edit it as needed before sending, and they will be sent one at a time as you confirm it. This of course is very slow and cumbersome if you send more than a few, but it's a good idea to do this with a few at first before sending to a whole list, so you can make sure everything looks correct.
Send Customer Text Messages (or Send Reservation Text Messages) -- Finally, this button would be clicked to start sending the batch. A confirmation will be shown first, indicating how many will be sent. If you didn't have the Preview option selected, then it will start sending them quickly in "batches" with pauses between them, as defined in the Batch Messaging Options. For instance, it may send 10 at a time, with a 5-second pause between them. This is partly to allow you a chance to cancel during sending (during each pause period), but is also helpful in keeping your Text provider from flagging you as sending spam.
Resuming a batch
If a batch is canceled or stops due to an error, it will ask if you want to keep the unsent ones selected for re-sending. If you do, then those will be selected in the list, so all you have to do to resume is click the Send button again. (If you change what is selected and click Send again, then it will ask whether you want to use the new selection or the saved 'unsent' list.)
You may also need to exit this report function to make corrections before continuing -- don't worry, if there are unsent records then it will ask if you want to save those for next time. As long as you re-enter the report the same way again (e.g through the Reports menu, vs Arrivals, etc), and on the same workstation, then it will offer to re-select them again. Note that this also means it will keep a list of unsent records for each tab view separately. Also note that this list is workstation-specific, so each computer keeps track of its own list of unsent records for each tab view or report function.
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