ElectricalBossPro Blog — Electrical Contractor Software

Two-Way Texting and the Monthly Text Allowance in Electrical Contractor Software

Most homeowners would rather text their electrician than call. They are at work, the kids are asleep, or they just want a quick answer. A shop that can text back from the office, with the conversation tied to the customer's record, answers faster and keeps a history of what was said.

Texting From the Office

Monthly accounts, covered in Monthly Account Billing for Property Managers, Gyms and Retail Chains With Many Addresses, often run on quick texts with a property manager. Residential customers do too.

In ElectricalBossPro, the office can text customers directly, and customer replies come back to the office. That means a text to confirm a time, ask for a gate code, send a reminder about an estimate or answer a question about an invoice all happen from the same place where the customer's record lives. Anyone in the office can pick up a conversation where someone else left off.

That beats the common alternative in a small shop: customers texting the owner's personal cell phone. When the owner is on a ladder, under a house or on vacation, those texts wait. When they go to the office instead, whoever is at the desk can answer, and the answer is tied to the customer for the next person who looks. It also keeps the owner's personal number off every customer's phone.

Common office texts for an electrical company are simple: confirming a time, asking whether the panel area will be clear, sending a heads-up about a reschedule, or nudging a customer about an estimate they have not answered.

Automated Reminders and Alerts

Many texts go out without anyone typing them. Customers choose their alerts: a reminder the night before, an alert when they are next and an alert when the tech arrives. On top of those, automatic on-the-way and arrived texts go out from the tech app as the route moves.

Reminders and alerts can go by text and by email. Email does not count against the text allowance, so customers who prefer email can get their reminders there. The alerts are covered in Night Before, Next Stop, Arrived: Customer Alerts From Electrical Contractor Software.

The Monthly Text Allowance

Every plan includes a monthly text allowance, measured in segments sent and received:

• Start ($59/month): 500 segments
• Pro ($89/month): 1,000 segments
• Crew ($199/month): 2,000 segments

Both directions count. A text you send uses segments, and a reply the customer sends back uses segments too. Automated alerts count the same way as texts typed by the office.

What a Segment Is

Text messages are carried in segments. A short, plain message fits in one segment. A longer message is split into more than one. Some special characters, such as curly quotes, long dashes and emoji, make a message take up more room, so a message that would have been one segment can become two or more.

For a small electrical shop, the practical advice is simple: keep texts short and plain. “Hi, this is your electrician. We can come Thursday at 9. Does that work?” is one segment and says everything it needs to.

Making the Allowance Go Further

A few habits help a shop stay inside its allowance:

• Let customers pick their alerts. Customers who only want the arrived text get one alert, not three.
• Use email for long messages. Estimate follow-ups and invoices are better as email anyway.
• Keep office texts short. One clear question beats a paragraph.
• Avoid fancy characters. Plain punctuation keeps messages in fewer segments.

A one-van shop on Start and a shop with a few vans on Crew will use their allowances very differently. If texting is a big part of how you run, factor it into which plan fits.

Where Texting Works

Texting is for customers in the US and Canada. ElectricalBossPro also works for shops in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and bills customers in their own currency, but text messaging should be planned around US and Canadian numbers. Email reminders and the customer app work wherever your customers are.

Why It Matters

Texting fixes a lot of small problems. A homeowner who replies to a night-before reminder to reschedule saves your tech a wasted drive. A quick text asking for a gate code saves a skipped job. A reply about an estimate turns a quote into a booked install. Each conversation is tied to the customer, so the next person in the office can see what was said.

Most of all, it meets customers where they already are: on their phones, between other things. To see how texting fits with dispatch, alerts and billing, visit the electrical contractor software overview.