My company uses ClockShark for our daily laborer scheduling at different job sites around our city. Currently, our dispatcher writes the schedule and related information (job, site, scope of work, crew, time, etc.) into a word document, copies the information onto her phone and sends group messages to each crew with their daily information, allowing for clarifying responses to be immediately sent by dispatch. However, this is time consuming, and we would benefit significantly from automating this process.
Would appreciate any suggestions for workflow. This is what I had in mind:
Trigger on ClockShark schedule posted → Google Sheets lookup spreadsheet row (using employee name from clockshark schedule to find corresponding phone number) → SMS message to staff using Webhook
Here are some considerations:
- We have a subscription with Vonage business communications and could use their group SMS feature without additional cost, however it is no longer natively integrated with Zapier, my understanding is we would need a webhook POST and integrate with their API?
- Other options include SMS by Zapier (potentially?) and other paid services like Twilio. Problem is that we send out these dispatch messages daily and it could get costly especially if we aren’t able to send it as a group message. Less interested here.
- Google Sheets workaround is because clockshark does not store the phone number for each employee
- The dispatch line must be included in the text to be able to respond to questions immediately. This would flood her SMS inbox with an overwhelming number of threads if not sent as group messages
- Staff that gets the daily schedule tends to not be very diligent about looking on clockshark for their information which is the reason for the text message confirmation
- Open to other solutions of different integrations that could help accomplish the same goal
