The deferred work feature allows you to defer a job for a later date, rather than deleting it. A reminder can then be sent to the customer via SMS or email, increasing repeat business, and reducing lost sales.
The feature allows you to simply defer work rather than deleting it, this means that a reminder can be sent out to the customer at a later date, helping to reduce lost sales.
Here’s an example job that we’ve got loaded up, as you can see from the advisory notes, the job for the brake pads is advisory, and not strictly necessary, so the customer may be OK to use those brake pads for a few more weeks.
The customer came back and he decided that he didn’t want to have the brake pads done right away, so w’ere going to defer the job. To defer a job, simply click the delete icon against the job group. You’ll get an option to delete or defer the job, click the option to defer.
There are a few options that you’ll need to set in here, the due date sets how long to wait before the reminder should be sent out, we’re going to set this to three weeks. The reason is simply why the customer rejected that work, so in this case, it’s just because it’s not a critical thing, and deferred by is just the technician who authorised it. When you are happy with all the settings, click the defer button.
As you can see, the job grouping is no longer on the job, this is because it’s not going to be included on this job, because it has been deferred.
To finalise the deferred work and make it available for reporting, it is necessary to invoice the job. If you need any information on how to create invoices in Autowork Online, take a look at our creating invoices video as well.
Once the job has been invoiced, go to the reports menu and choose the customer relationship management option. From the dropdown menu in the top, select the option for deferred work. There are several options in this screen, the first is to select a date range for the reminders. We’re going to leave this blank to select all, and then click display.
The grid at the bottom contains a list of customers which have outstanding deferred work, we’re going to scroll down and find the one we made earlier. As you can see, there’s no check set against it, this means that no reminder’s been sent for this work, so we’re going to check it.
At the top, there are various selections for contact methods such as SMS or email, we’re going to go with SMS in this case. The message dropdown menu allows you to select from a range of message templates, we’re going to select the deferred work one. As you can see, there are several fields that are in square brackets such as the title and lastname, these are placeholders and the data will be pulled through automatically from the customer database.
When you’re happy with your message and the customers you have selected, click the send button. Now the customers you have selected should have received a text message reminding them of the work that they deferred. This helps to improve repeat business and reduce lost sales.
