Notification of Initiation of SMS charging 12/10/2019
Notification of Initiation of SMS charging 12/10/2019 for all messages sent over and above your 150/month included in all packages
Savvy Pet Spa would like to take this opportunity to thank all our amazing clients that have joined us over the past 12 months. We are nearly reaching our 1 year anniversary and we have had an incredible time, met some fabulously talented groomers and have totally thrown ourselves into the Pet Grooming World.
Throughout this last year we have prioritised developing functionality that you need, and want, to make sure Savvy Pet Spa meets the needs of all its clients. We are determined that this platform will be by far the best system available and we want to thank you so much for helping us get there and showing us so much support and loyalty! It’s a bit dull having to read about SMS, but do keep reading till the bottom for a thankyou to all our fabulous clients!
As we have made your requirements our top priority since we launched, we have consequently put to the bottom of our list the boring stuff, like charging for SMS messages used over and above those included in the packages. Many of our groomers have had a wonderful year of being able to use as many messages as they have wanted to use with no restrictions and no extra costs. We’d love to carry on like that forever, but for any business that would not be sustainable. We are growing so fast, with new groomers joining the platform daily, and so now is the time that we need sadly to implement the ability for you all to buy SMS if you need any over and above the 150/month included in all plans. This won’t come into effect immediately. We plan to roll it out one month from today.
We want to give you some hints and tips first though, to minimise the need for you to use all your SMS allowance:
1.Collect email addresses, this gives you more power to contact via email rather than always using SMS, you have one month to make it your mission to fill in all those email addresses for your customers!
2. If you are on advanced or extra, think carefully about whether you need all your forms of communication to go via SMS, perhaps you just would like auto reminders to go out via SMS and the appointment message buttons with confirmations etc to go out via email. Maybe just ready for collection could be an SMS and everything else email. The Advanced and Extra plans give you more opportunity to tailor how you want messages to go out.
3. Check in with your clients and chat about their communication preferences, if they are happy to be contacted via email then think about swapping over their preferences in their customer profile to be just email, switching off SMS and leaving the SMS quota just for those that don’t use email.
4. Keep your messages short and to the point, there is a limit of 160 characters per message, if you have a message that is longer than that you will use 2 messages. If you have more than 320 characters, then you will have 3 deducted from your allocation. This is not a Savvy restriction, but is from the SMS providers. Definitely a good opportunity to review your reminder message in Core and all your appointment messages in Advanced & Extra. For core users, we will make sure that the default appointment messages are nice and concise!
5. Lots of people have asked for a Send to All SMS feature, we will introduce this, but beware that for most people this will use up their allowance and more in one go, so be sure that you don’t really mean email to all rather than SMS to all!
For all those groomers out there that don’t mind lots of SMS going out and love the benefits of reducing no shows and saving your own time in manually messaging clients, then we have given you lots of bundle options. We wanted to allow you to just buy what you need when you need it, or to have the choice of stocking up at a better rate. We have kept pricing very competitive, so to cover our SMS charges whilst keeping pricing comparable to other software systems available.
You will be able to check how many SMS from your monthly plan you have used and then you will be able to purchase a top up bundle, these don’t have a time limit, so if you want to buy in bulk you can and they will just sit in your account until you have used them up. You can find out your usage and buy a new bundle by going to the speech bubble icon on the top right of the app screen…
Just remember though that for many of our users, just one client attending their appointment, that would otherwise have forgotten, could cover the cost for 500-1000 text messages!
So, once again, thank you to all our clients for their support this year. I know you guys will understand that we do now need to charge for extra SMS. So, as a special token of our appreciation to all our loyal customers, Ben and his team will be allocating a free 100 SMS bundle to all accounts that are live by 5pm UK time on Monday 16th September. For all our current trialists, the Savvy team will be on hand as always to help you convert your trial account to a full account before the Monday deadline.
Thankyou from everyone at Savvy Pet Spa!