Client Contact Preferences can be used to determine how your clients are able receive correspondence from your PPS system. These settings apply to Confirmations, Reminders, Follow-Ups, and Mail Shots.
For a client to receive correspondence in a particular format (E-Mail, SMS, etc.) you'll need to make sure that their preferences allow for it and also that you have set that option up as part of that particular process. For example, a client may be set to receive E-Mail Appointment Confirmations in their preferences but if you do not create an E-Mail confirmation template or enable E-Mails in the Confirmation settings then the client will not receive one.
Contact preferences can be applied on a per-client basis or across your entire system. You'll find information on both of these options below.
Section 1 - Applying Contact Preferences to Individual Clients
a. To make changes to the contact preferences of an individual client access their Client Details screen via Client > Main Client Details.
b. Scroll down to the Preferences section or click Preferences in the top right corner of the window to be taken there.
c. Here you'll find a table of tick boxes, each of which relates to a particular type of correspondence in a particular format. When you create a new PPS client the options that are applied here will match those default settings you've set up as per the steps in Section 2 of this guide. You can come to the client details screen at any time to make changes on an individual basis. Tick or untick each of the boxes to determine what this client should or should not be able to receive.
As shown in the example above you can choose to enable multiple formats (SMS, E-Mail, etc.) per correspondence type. This does not necessarily mean that the client will receive all of these. Excluding a client from any of these options will not restrict you from sending them manual emails, SMS, or Letters via the Activities menu.
d. You also have the options from here to exclude this client from Mail Shots and Lock their Preferences. If you exclude the client from Mail Shots then it's easily possible to ensure they do not receive anything produced in the Mail Shot process.
Locking the client's preferences means they are excluded from any system-wide updates you may make to Contact Preferences. If this is not ticked then any time you roll-out any changes to preferences as shown in Section 2 then the preferences for this particular client will also change.
Section 2 - Applying Contact Preferences across the System
a. Navigate to Tools > Options > General System Options > Set Up Client Preferences.
b. In this screen you will see options for all of the automatic correspondence types available on the system. There are two methods to controlling these settings; Auto-Select and Always Switch on.
Auto-Select means the system will check what contact information a client has available and set the preferences accordingly. In the example above for Appointment Booking Confirmations we have First Try E-Mail, if not SMS. This means that if a client has an E-Mail address in their client details then confirmations will be enabled by E-Mail only. If they do not have an E-Mail address but do have a mobile number then they'll be enabled for SMS confirmations only.
Always switch on means the system will apply a preference to a client regardless of the contact information available. In the example below Reminders will be enabled for both E-Mail and SMS regardless of whether a client has either or both of these details on the system.
c. Once you've configured your settings you can save them by pressing Apply. Simply doing this will not make any changes to existing clients on the system but will mean that any clients you add in future will adhere to the new settings. Should you wish to roll these settings out to clients already on your system then choose Update Now! after you've pressed Apply. This will then go through and update any existing clients whose preferences are not locked. It may take a few minutes to complete the update, after which point you can close out of this screen.