A notification can be sent to multiple recipients for the purposes of announcements, notices and water outages. The user can select this option from the “Notifications” menu. This is a full-screen form rather than a modal. The form will maintain its state, including if the user navigates away to search for and add recipients.
Elements of the Send Group Notification form are as follows;
- Method Preference 1- The first preference for sending the notification as a select control. Will default to “Push Notification”. Note that, unlike an individual notification, the recipient list may include customers that may not have this preference available, particularly those that may have been tagged as a result of directly entering / pasting into the recipient list.
- Method Preference 2 - The second preference for sending the notification as a select control. This field is mandatory.
- Method Preference 3 - The third preference for sending the notification as a select control. Is mandatory.
- Message Type - Select list to classify the type of message. In some contexts, this is used as the notification title (from the perspective of the staff user). This message type may default to a value based on the context of the form. The list of message types can be updated through the system configuration. The following messages types are be available:
- Water Service Disruption
- Public Notice
- Water Notices Issued
- Custom Notification
- Delay Delivery?- A checkbox which, when selected will cause the message to be sent at a specific time in the future.
- Message Details - The details of the message that will be sent
- Message Length - Shows the number of characters in the message
Add Recipients to a Group Notification
Positioned to the right of the form the recipient control is used to add / bind recipients to this notification, labelled 'Add Recipients'.
From here there are a number of ways the user can add recipients to the Group Notification.
From a User Search - this will direct the user to the Customer User Search as described in Customer Management. Once the user is presented with the search results they are able to select multiple users or All from the search results.
It should be noted that the effect of this control is “additive” to the recipient list. The operator is selecting users to add to that existing list. In some situations, multiple searches may be undertaken for one group notification.
From a list of Account Numbers - Selecting this option will display a modal as per the example in 40. This will allow the user to type or paste in a series of account numbers. The form should accept data that has been pasted in from a spreadsheet, converting the cell data to commas or another delimiter. Note that comas, semicolons, tabs or carriage returns will be used as delimiters.
From List of Email Addresses - As per 'from a list of account numbers' but for email addresses. In this case, addresses are validated using a regular expression only. They are not matched to existing customers – presumed that user has extracted these from another valid system.
