In this article, we explain the best ways to prevent feedback invitations from being sent to your regular customers
Repeat customers, regulars, commercial customers, loyal business. Whatever you want to call them, we all love them, and we all know how important it is to keep them happy.
While it's important to check in with your customers periodically to ensure they're still raving about your service, we understand that you probably don't want to send a feedback invitation every time you invoice a group builder, or every time someone comes in to get their hair colour touched up.
There are several ways to prevent sending repeat invitations, so read on to learn which method is best for your situation.
Blocking invitations using the cool off period
Adding a contact to your blocklist
Xero Automation and keyword filters
simPRO Automation and exclusion rules
Blocking invitations using the cool off period
The cool off period will allow a contact to receive one invitation within X period of time, and block any subsequent invitations from sending.
This is a great approach if you have a long list of customers you complete repeat work for.
The default cool off period is 30 days, but you can manually update this to any number of days by following the instructions here.
Let's take this scenario as an example. You're an Electrician who does a lot of repeat work for Jenny the property manager, and you have set your cool off period to 365 days.
Jenny will receive an invitation from you when you complete your first job and will be automatically added to the 365 day cool off period.
The next time you try to send an invitation to Jenny, betterbunch will spot that Jenny is inside the 365 day cool off period and prevent the subsequent invitation from sending.
Once 365 days pass, Jenny will leave the cool off period, so the next time you try to send an invitation, it will be delivered.
Just a note, the cool off period works for invitations generated via automation, the single invitation method, and batch invitation methods.
Adding a contact to your blocklist
Adding contacts to a blocklist is another easy way to prevent invitations from sending to specific contacts.
This is a great way to prevent sending invitations to someone who has opted-out of communications from your business.
Simply type their phone number or email address into your blocklist, and betterbunch will prevent an invitation from being delivered to that contact.
Xero Automation and keyword filters
If you are a Xero automation user, you can prevent invitations from sending to customers based on keywords found on their invoice.
This is a great way to prevent invitations from sending to a customer that pays progress payments.
Let's consider this scenario. You're a builder, and your betterbunch keyword filter contains 'deposit' and 'progress payment'.
You're completing a renovation at Dave's house, and have sent him an invoice to pay a 50% deposit for materials. The description of the invoice says "This is a deposit for the renovation works".
As the invoice contains the word 'deposit', a feedback invitation will not be sent.
In 2 months, you send another invoice to Dave for the final payment. The description of this invoice is "This is the final invoice". betterbunch will take Dave's contact details from the Xero invoice, and automatically send an invitation to Dave asking for his feedback.
simPRO Automation and exclusion rules
If you are a simPRO automation user, you can prevent invitations from sending to customers using exclusion rules.
This is a great way to prevent invitations from sending to groups of customers if you use tags, zones, or cost centres to sort your jobs within simPRO.
An example of this in action may be that you do not want commercial customers to receive feedback invitations, so you add the keyword 'commercial customer' to your exclusion rules.
If a job is completed, but it is tagged as "commercial customer', then a feedback invitation will not send.