Sending one-off notifications to your customers about changing delivery expectations is a time suck. When a large set of customers need to be notified about delays or wide scale delivery issues, using the Convey bulk alert functionality will make your team more efficient and ensure all affected customers are alerted with just a few clicks.

Common Use Cases
Identifying Shipments to Alert
Crafting Your Message 
Sending Alerts
Who Can Send a Bulk Alert?
Who Will Receive Alerts?
How Many Can I Send at One Time?
Will Customers Receive More Than One Alert?
How Can I See Who I Just Alerted?
How Can I See Who I Just Alerted?
How do I Know Which Alerts Failed to Send?
Other FAQs

Have questions that are not answered here? Let us know!

Common Use Cases

Unsure about when your team could or should make use of bulk alerts? We have identified some of the most common use cases here. That said, this list is not exhaustive. If your team wants to support scenarios not outlined below, we want to hear from you!

• You are experiencing a large scale delivery problem (e.g. a truck fire) that affects a high volume of customers. You typically export a list of shipments from Convey and use that to identify customers in your CRM in order to communicate with customers.
• You send one-off alerts to customers via Convey when time-sensitive deliveries are/expected to be late.
• You send one-off alerts to customers to alert them about appointment scheduling when the carrier has been unable to get ahold of them.
• Your team wants to use Convey predictive exceptions to alert a large set of customers about delays before it's too late. 

Identifying Shipments to Alert

Start by using filters on All Shipments to isolate the subset of shipments that you need to alert customers about. All shipments in the results set will be included in the alert cohort -  refine your search accordingly.

Example:

• Carrier = Fedex
• Estimated Delivery Date = today
• Predicted to Miss EDD = 95%+
• Carrier Ship Date = this week

Once you are happy with the shipments you have filtered, choose Send Consumer Alert from the action menu in the top right hand corner of the page.

Note that the limit on the number of shipments to send alerts for at one time is 5000. If your cohort is larger than 5000, you will get an error. To resolve, further refine your filter set.

Crafting Your Message 

Use the text box in the modal to construct your message. There is a 300 character limit. Remember that the same message will be sent to all recipients that are subscribed to the selected shipments. Never include customer-specific information or PII.

Recent Messages

Refer to this section to understand how many shipments within your selected cohort have had an associated customer alert (either direct or in bulk) sent within the last 24 hours. This information is intended to help you understand whether you might be communicating about the same issue more than once. It is also meant to help ensure you are abiding by your company’s communication policies. 

Tracking Page
If your account supports a Convey tracking page, select to make this message visible there, as well.

Sending Alerts

Once you have double checked that your message and selections are correct, click SEND ALERTS.

The total number of successful alerts sent will be referenced in the success or failure messages that follow. Each subscription (SMS and/or email) associated with the shipment will receive the alert. If the shipment does not have a subscription but does have an associated customer destination email address , we will send your message to that email address.

Important Details

Who Can Send a Bulk Alert?

At this time, feature access is limited to Account Admins. Any user with this role will be able to send alerts. 

Who Will Receive Alerts?

Each subscription (SMS and/or email) associated with a shipment will receive the alert. If the shipment does not have a subscription but does have an associated customer destination email address, we will send your message to that email address.

How Many Can I Send at One Time?

The max send limit is 5000.

Will Customers Receive More Than One Alert?

Yes. We will send the alert to any subscriptions that are associated with the shipment. This means that if your customer has subscribed both their phone number and their email address, they will receive a text message and an email.

Likewise, if the group of shipments that you have selected contains multiple shipments for the same customer, that customer will receive alerts (to either the phone number, email address or both) for each shipment.

How Can I See Who I Just Alerted?

First, make sure that you have the Latest Alert Date and Latest Consumer Alert columns enabled on All Shipments. Once you have successfully sent the alert, the message will be visible on the cohort of shipments that you included in the send, as seen here. 

To find this group of shipments after the fact, use the Consumer Alert Date filter to search for shipments that received a bulk alert on a specific date or sometime during a range.

How do I Know Which Alerts Failed to Send?

Any shipment alerts that failed will immediately be visible in a failure message at the top of the shipment list. Failures will occur if there are not any subscriptions or destination contact information on the shipment OR if the shipment is older than 90 days. 

You can export the affected shipments and use that list to communicate with your customer via an alternate channel or internal system.

Other FAQs

Why is the message character count limited to 300?
This limit exists to support a better experience for customers who will receive your message via SMS.

What if I need to send alerts for more than 5000 shipments?
If the group of affected shipments is larger than 5000, you will need to split your alert into multiple sends. During beta, please contact your Convey team for help with doing this.

What is the difference between the bulk alert and the direct alert from the Shipment Details page?
The direct alert from Shipment Details is very similar. It allows you to send an ad-hoc alert directly to the shipment destination/consignee. With bulk alerts, the result is the same but you are sending to multiple customers at one time.

Can I go back to find who I sent these alerts to, after the fact?
At the onset of our beta, you will need to contact Convey to be able to quickly identify who was sent an alert. We will, during the beta period, release the functionality you will need to search for and find shipments that were sent a bulk alert and when it was sent. 

Can a customer respond to these alerts?
Yes. Your Convey alert account should be set up with a functional reply email address if you want to make sure you can receive replies. Please confirm set-up with your EAD if you are not sure as to how your account is currently configured.

Can I save alerts that I have started, as drafts?
No, draft alerts are not currently supported. 

Can I save an alert message to reuse in the future?
Not at this time. Future functionality will allow for saving of and configuration of templates but that it is not yet supported.

I have visibility to partner shipments within my account - will those shipments be sent a bulk alert if they are selected as part of a batch?
No. Bulk alerts can only be sent to shipments that are owned by your account. If you select partner shipments that you have visibility to but do not own, those shipments will be excluded from your bulk send. You will receive a message on the composition modal that explains this.