PPS Activities allow you to contact clients, third parties, and other users of your system. This guide will act as an introduction to PPS Activities which come in the following formats:
-Letters: Print or email letters and record these on your client records. Letters can be plain text or use .doc templates.
-E-Mails: Send plain text or HTML e-mails to clients or third parties .
-SMS Messages: Set up an SMS account and purchase credits to send information direct to your client's mobile phones.
-Labels: Print labels with client addresses or other information automatically populated
-Personal Actions: Assign tasks to yourself or other PPS users and link it to a client or third party
-Contact Notes: Use Contact Notes to associate tasks to a client or third party or record an instance of contact with them
-Telephone Calls: Make notes of calls that have occurred relating to a client or third party, or record notes for calls to be made later
-PPS Messages: Send messages to other PPS users or user groups and link to clients where necessary.
Find details on Letters, E-Mails, SMS, and Telephone calls here. Information on PPS Messages, Contact Notes, and Personal actions can be found here.
Section 1 - Templates
a. Use Activity Templates to pre-define text for activities you send from your PPS system and make use of Merge Fields to automatically populate information within such as client and appointment details. These templates can be used in automatically scheduled activities or for those you may send individually on an ad-hoc basis.
b. For your letters use the Letter Layout Designer found via Tools > Layout Designers to add any images or logos as default or make changes to the general layout. By default PPS applies a plain text letterhead which you can set up via Tools > System Set Up > Set Up Letterhead.
Section 2 - E-Mails and SMS Accounts
a. If you're using a PPS Hosted system then use of our Sendgrid SMTP account is set up as standard. You can configure this with your own from name and address via Tools > System Set Up > E-Mail Settings. If you're a Hosted user and would like to use your own SMTP account then let our support team know via support@rushcliff.com.
If you're hosting your own PPS system then you can set PPS to send E-Mails either by a MAPI compliant E-Mail program such as Microsoft Outlook or via an SMTP account. Navigate to Tools > System Set Up > E-Mail Settings and choose either of these options. If sending via an SMTP server then contact your provider for the necessary account details and enter them here.
Find general information on PPS' E-Mail settings here.
b. To send SMS messages through PPS you will need an account with our SMS provider; BOOM SMS. Details of setting up PPS with BOOM can be found here.
Section 3 - Scheduling and Processing Activities
a. You can manually create and send activities at any time and either use an activity template or create ad-hoc content via the Activities option in your main PPS menu.
b. PPS can also automatically schedule activities based on appointments, charges, or other activities. Find information on configuring appointment confirmations (at the time of booking), reminders (some time before the appointment) here. Follow-ups can be scheduled for some time after an appointment, charge, or another activity. Find information on setting up follow-ups here.
c. The Activities List and Process Your Outstanding Activities screens, found under the Activities menu are the places from which you can review and process your activities. Use the Process Activities screen to easily send out anything that is due and use the Activities List to view past, present, and future activities of all types.
d. As and when activities are due or if you get a message from another system user you can receive real-time alerts by setting up automatic check for messages.
Section 4 - Reaching your Clients
a. In PPS you can configure and control the way each of your clients is contacted to suit both your preferences and theirs. Client Preferences allow you to control, on both an individual and system-wide basis, the formats in which clients receive automated activities such as confirmations, reminders, follow-ups and Mailshots.
b. As well as contacting clients individually either via manual sending or automatic acitvities PPS can be used to contact your clients en-masse using the Mail Merge process. This works alongside PPS Reports to allow you to send out mass contact to either all the clients on your system or those who match a specific criteria decided by you.