Feature Overview: Visit Offer Notifications

When using visit offers in AlayaCare, you have the option to send employees notifications by email or SMS or as push notifications on Android or iOS to let them know that they have received a visit or recurrence offer. From the email, SMS message, or push notification, the employee can click to open the offer in AlayaCare and either accept or reject the shift.  

• Configuring visit offer notifications at the system level
• Configuring visit offer notifications at the employee level
• Sending visit offer notifications from the AlayaCare web app
• Receiving visit offer notifications by email
• Receiving visit offer notifications by SMS 
• Receiving visit offer notifications as mobile push notifications
• Testing notifications workflows in non-production environments

Visit offer notifications are available in French as well as English.  

Configuring visit offer notifications at the system level

Notifications must be configured at both the system and employee level. 

To  use email notifications for visit offers, the Visit Offers feature flag must be enabled.

To have the option to use SMS notifications for visit offers, the SMS Notifications feature flag must be enabled in Settings>Features.

In Settings>System Settings>Notification Settings, there are two settings related to visit and recurrence offers: Visit and Recurrence Offers  Sent and Visit and Recurrence Offers Assigned. If the SMS Notifications feature flag is turned on, you will have the option to check SMS, Email, or Push as the medium through which notifications will be sent.

 If the setting Visit and Recurrence Offers Sent is enabled in system settings and on the employee’s profile, a notification will be sent to the employee when a visit or recurrence is offered to them.

If Visit and Recurrence Offers Assigned is enabled in system settings and on the employee’s profile, a notification will be sent to the employee when a visit or recurrence offer is assigned to them.

If Email, SMS, or Push are selected at the system and employee level, the employee will receive all visit and recurrence offer notifications by email, SMS, and push notification. You will not be able to choose the notification medium when sending the offer.

If you are using SMS notifications, there is also a new setting in Settings>Locale for setting the country code that will be used for notifications by text. By default it will be set to +1, the country code for the US and Canada.

Configuring visit offer notifications at the employee level

Once the notification settings for visit offers are configured at the system level, you must configure them at the individual employee level.

In Employment>Notification Settings on the employee profile, click  Set/Edit for Visit and Recurrence Offers  Sent to trigger notifications when the employee is offered a visit or recurrence.

Visit and Recurrence Offers Assigned to trigger notifications when the employee is assigned to an offered visit or recurrence.

For each type of notification, you can choose to send notifications by Email, SMS, or Push.

You will receive a warning if you are trying to active email or SMS notifications for an employee, but the employee does not have an email address or main phone number configured in Demographics.

The phone number configured in the Phone (Main) (phone_main) form context field in the Demographics tab of the employee’s profile is the phone number that will be used for sending SMS notifications. When sending an SMS to an employee, if the phone number does not start with + the system will automatically update the phone number entered on the employee’s profile to be prefixed with the country code configured in Settings>Locale for the branch of the employee. All characters other than numerals 0 through 9 and + will be discounted.

The Correspondence Language under the Demographics tab in the employee profile controls whether notifications are sent in English or French. English will be the default value. If French is selected as the Correspondence Language on the employee profile, email, SMS, and push notifications for visit/recurrence offers will be sent in French.  

Make sure to check that employee phone numbers, email addresses, and correspondence languages are correctly configured before enabling visit offer notifications for employees. Because of the caching logic in place for notifications, it can take up to 30 minutes for updates to these fields to go through. 

Sending visit offer notifications from the AlayaCare web app

As soon as you select Send Offer  or Re-Send Offer for a visit or recurrence, an email, SMS, or push notification will be triggered for all employees that have been selected on the offer.

  The Manage Visit and Recurrence Offers ACL will still control whether an employee can send visit/recurrence offers.

A yellow warning icon with a tooltip will appear next to the employee’s name if an email address or phone number is not configured for one of the employees to whom you are sending an offer.

If you are using push notifications, a warning will appear if one of the selected employees is not logged in to the AlayaCare mobile app on a mobile device. In this scenario, there is no device available to which to send push notifications for that employee. 

A warning will also appear next to the employee’s name if notifications have not been configured for one of the selected employees.

 You cannot send a visit offer to more than 200 employees. If more than 200 employees are selected, the +Add and Send Offer buttons will be disabled. If you hover over the disabled buttons, the following warning will be displayed: Cannot add more than 200 employees to a visit or recurrence offer. (Note that you will be able to select more than 200 employees using the employee finder but will not be able to send the offer until some of the employees are removed.)

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When 200 employees are added to an offer, the Send Offer button will be enabled but the +Add button will be disabled to prevent you from adding more employees.

To learn more about sending visit offers from the AlayaCare web app, see How do I offer a Vacant Visit or Recurrence?

Receiving visit offer notifications by email

If your organization is using email notifications, the employee will receive an email to the email address configured in their profile that looks like one of the two messages below, depending on whether it is an offer or a recurrence:

                                      

The company name and logo will be pulled from Settings>Agency Information.

 Important note: the dimensions and format of your agency's logo can affect how it is rendered in the email. Listed below are the ideal specs for your agency logo so that it appears correctly in the email: 

• Width: 299 px
• Height: 92 px 
• Format: JPG or PNG

The name of the image file you upload must also end with the extension (for example, image.png not image.png 2). 

The subject of the email will be AlayaAlert – Visit Offer.  The sender’s email address will be the address that was configured for you in Settings>System Settings>External Email Config or, if no address is configured for the organization, [e-mail]. 

 Important note: further configuration is required to set up the email from which the notifications will be sent. Contact your client success manager or client relationship manager to request to set up or change your Send email for notifications.  Please do not make any changes on your own in Settings>System Settings>External Email Config as it could result in missed email notifications.

The email will contain the following information:

• The date and time of the single visit or first visit of the recurrence (in your organization's preferred format)
• The frequency of the recurrence (if applicable)
• The city and zip code of the visit address
• The service code of the visit or recurrence

You can select the Open in AlayaCare button to open the AlayaCare mobile app  so you can accept or reject the offer. The time at which the offer expires will be displayed under this button. Note that you can only open this link to the mobile app from a mobile device.

The Contact Us hyperlink will open a new email to the email address configured in Settings>Agency Information>Email field. The Contact Us link will not be displayed if an email address is not configured in Agency Information. About AlayaCare links to this page: https://www.alayacare.com/about-alayacare.

If the employee is later assigned to a visit or recurrence that was offered,  they will receive the following message:

                         

The employee can select the Open in AlayaCare button to view the visit or recurrence they have been assigned to. Note that you can only open this link to the mobile app from a mobile device.

Receiving visit offer notifications by SMS 

If an organization is using SMS notifications, the employee will receive a text to the main phone number configured in the Demographics tab on their employee profile.

The full text message will include more details about the visit or recurrence and a link to open the offer in the AlayaCare mobile app.

                                                

The following details will be included in the SMS:

• The employee’s first and last names.
• The date and time of the visit.
• The frequency of the recurrence (if applicable).
• The service code of the visit.
• The city and zip code of the visit address.

The employee can tap the hyperlink to open the offer in AlayaCare and accept or reject the offer.

Once the employee has been assigned to an offered visit or recurrence, they will receive the following message: 

                        

The employee will be able to tap the hyperlink to open the assigned visit in the AlayaCare mobile app.

To opt out of SMS notifications, simply reply to the message from your device with one of the following:

• ARRET (French)

• CANCEL

• END

• OPT-OUT

• OPTOUT

• QUIT

• REMOVE

• STOP

• TD

• UNSUBSCRIBE

After replying to the message with one of these codes, you will no longer receive the SMS notifications to your device.

Receiving visit offer notifications as mobile push notifications

If push notifications are configured for visit offers sent for an employee using the mobile application, a native iOS or Android push notification will be sent to the employee when a visit or recurrence is offered to them.

Note that you must be logged in to the mobile app to receive push notifications, but you do not have to be actively using the app. If your session has expired, you will be prompted to reenter your password before you can view the offer or visit in the AlayaCare mobile app. You will not receive push notifications if you log out of the AlayaCare app completely.

Tap the notification to open the offered visit or recurrence in the AlayaCare mobile app.

If push notifications are configured for the employee for visit offers assigned, a push notification will be sent when the employee is assigned to a previously offered visit or recurrence.

Tap the notification to open the visit in AlayaCare.

If the employee’s correspondence language is set to French on their employee profile on the web app, the push notifications will be in French.

Tracking visit offer notifications sent from AlayaCare 

The notification outbox allows you to review details about all visit offer notifications sent out of AlayaCare, including information about the message type, date and time of sending, sender and recipient names, and whether each message was successfully sent and delivered. You can also resend any messages that were not successfully delivered the first time.

Important note: delivery tracking is not yet available for push notifications. You will be able to see if push notifications were successfully sent from AlayaCare in the notifications outbox but not if they were successfully delivered to a mobile device.  

You can access the outbox by going to Dashboard>Messages>Outbox. To learn more, see How do I use the notification outbox to track visit offer notifications?

Testing notifications workflows in non-production environments

 The notification testing feature in Settings>Features allows you to test your notification workflows in non-production environments before enabling email, SMS, or push notifications in production environments. This feature flag is only available in non-production environments (UAT, preview, training, staging, etc.)

When notifications are sent from a non-production environment, the type of environment (UAT, training, preview, etc.) will be included in the subject of the email, SMS message, or push notification.