Pressing On my way has always told the office. Switch this on and it tells the customer too.
Ryan's Plumbing: Hi Andrew, we're on our way to you now for your boiler service. See you shortly. Any problems, give us a ring on 01709 123456.
Or as an email, subject We're on our way, if that's the one your customers read.
It's the message most trades already send by hand from the van, and it's the one that stops the half-eight phone call asking whether you're still coming.
Switching it on
Head to Settings → Customers → Automatic messages and tap On my way. It has two switches, Text and Email, and you can have either, both or neither. It sits with the booking confirmation and the appointment reminder, because it's the same kind of thing: a message that goes on its own once you've said it can.
It's Customer messages, not Notifications. Settings → Mucka → Notifications is your own alerts, the ones that reach your phone. This one goes to your customers.
Or just ask. Say "text people when we set off" to Mucka and it'll switch it on, as long as you're the owner.
What sets it off
Anything that moves the job to Travelling:
- The On my way button on the home screen or the diary card.
- Picking Travelling from the status list on the job.
- Telling Mucka out loud — "on my way", "just leaving now", "heading to the Walker job".
- Saying yes when Mucka asks "want me to mark you as travelling on that one?" after you've asked for directions.
Whichever route you take, the customer hears once — on each channel you've switched on.
It doesn't wait for office hours
This is the one difference from the other two. Booking confirmations and reminders are held to 8am–8pm, because Mucka decided to send those and nobody wants one at midnight.
This one goes the moment the button is pressed, whatever the time. Somebody setting off to an emergency at six in the morning is telling the customer something they're glad to hear, and holding it until eight would deliver it two hours after you'd been and gone.
What it won't do
- It won't send twice. One message per job per person, however many times the button gets pressed. An engineer correcting a mis-tap doesn't message the customer again.
- It won't text a pencilled job. A pencil holds the slot but promises nothing, so "we're on our way" would be the first that customer had heard of it. Confirm the job first.
- It won't send with nothing to send to. No mobile means no text; no email address means no email. If you've got one and not the other, whichever you've got still goes. Nothing pretends otherwise.
- It won't send to someone who's texted STOP, or to someone who's unsubscribed from the emails. Both are the customer's own call and neither can be overridden.
- It won't fire on jobs brought in from your old software. Historical work that was mirrored in never texts anybody, whatever happens to its status.
Changing the wording
Same place. Open On my way and each channel gets its own box — the text and the email read differently, so they're worded separately, and the email has a subject line. Rewrite either to sound like you, drop in their first name or what the visit's for, and the preview shows exactly what the customer gets — for the text, business name on the front, contact number on the end, and what it counts as in texts.
There's deliberately no arrival time in the default wording. The text goes as you pull off somebody else's drive, and quoting the booked slot back at ten past nine reads like a system talking. "See you shortly" is the honest version.
Who can switch it on
Owners and anyone with workspace management permission. Engineers can press the button — they just can't decide whether it messages anybody.