Drop Appointment Slot Notification Alerts

We have recently released a feature that allows enterprises to send delivery appointment notifications to the couriers – to avoid delays in attending the drop appointments at a marketplace warehouse – leading to further delays in the transmission of a shipment.

Our system is currently only configured to send out email notifications and these notifications in the following frequency and respective logic:

Notification #	Trigger Time
Notification 1	At 10 AM, 3 days prior to the start of the delivery slot (drop_start_time )
Notification 2	At 10 AM, 1 day prior to the drop_start_time i.e. start of the delivery slot

To start sending these appointment notifications, customers can follow the following steps:

Configuring Email IDs to which notifications need to be sent:

Log into the Clickpost dashboard and go to Settings > Carrier > Integrations and you’ll get to the following screen
Click the highlighted section, and you’ll be presented with the following screen:
Here, kindly select “Yes” to enable the shipment notification service.
In the Email ID section, you’ll be able to add the email IDs that you wish to send these notifications to. You can add multiple email IDs here.
On pressing “Submit” you’ll be able to save the config.

Now, to configure the Email body to be sent as notifications:

Go into the “Notifications” tab ( just below the “Carrier” tab you were on in the previous step ) and you’ll be presented with the following screen
In the highlighted section in the above screen ( “Email” tab) click on the “View Details” button to get to the following screen:
Here, the default Gateway set is the Clickpost Gateway.
If you click on the highlighted “view” button, you will be able to configure a different email client of your choice. We have the following available at our end:
If happy with your selection of the email client, you can scroll down to the “Clickpost Specific Message (Forward)” section, you’ll find the “Appointment Based Notification” as one of the choices that you can configure.
As highlighted in this screenshot, there are many points of interaction on this.
1. Active/Inactive toggle: to activate or deactivate the email template.
2. View Template: to view the template that has been set.
3. Add New: if you're setting the template for the first time.
  If you’re configuring this for the first time, we’ll click on the “Add New +” field and will be granted a screen to configure the email template.

Here’s what all of these fields indicate how you can fill the same

Field	Description	Sample Data
Language	Two choices in the dropdown to choose from here: 1. Eng - English 2. Ara - Arabic
Accounts	Dropdown with all the accounts configured by you. You can choose the Courier and Account where we'd configured the reminder emails
Subject	Dropdown with all the accounts configured by you. You can choose the Courier and Account where we'd configured the reminder emails"	Drop Notification Reminder
From Email	The email id from which these messages will be sent. This should be an email ID that's configured with the Email service provider.	`[email protected]`
Reply Email	The email id to which the recipients can reply.	`[email protected]`
From Name	The email id to which the recipients can reply.	Enterprise
Reply Name	The Recipient Name for the reply email address	Enterprise Operations
Template	The template of the message that you'd like to send to the recipients of the email id. You can use the tags to indicate clickpost-specific fields.	`Hi __courier_partner__ team, this is a reminder email to remind of the pick scheduled for the shipment with AWB: __waybill__ This shipment needs to be dropped off on __delivery_date__ at __delivery_address__ between __drop_start_time__ to __drop_end_time__`

When done, you can choose to “Add new”
You can also do an “Instant Test” to test the configuration.
Once done, you have configured the remainder email ID that you’ll send to the customer!

Sending these fields in Clickpost API

Lastly, to indicate the drop slot to Clickpost, enterprises can send in these timestamps to drop_start_time and drop_end_time fields respectively in the Clickpost payload.

This can be done both via the Clickpost payload and via the OC via the File Upload feature.

When done via the API, you can send in these values in the following manner in the v3 Order Creation API payload

{  
   "drop_info":{  
      "drop_lat":0,  
      "drop_city":"Mumbai",  
      "drop_long":0,  
      "drop_name":"Demo Drop Name",  
      "drop_email":"[email protected]",  
      "drop_phone":"9876543210",  
      "drop_state":"Maharashtra",  
      "drop_address":"123 ABC St",  
      "drop_district":"Mumbai City",  
      "drop_landmark":null,  
      "drop_pincode":"400065",  
      "drop_country":"IN",  
      "drop_address_type":"RESIDENTIAL",  
      "drop_start_time": "2023-05-23T10:00:00+0530",  
      "drop_end_time": "2023-05-23T13:00:00+0530"  
   }

When sharing the drop and start time it’s imperative that you add the timestamp in the format: 2023-05-23T13:00:00+0530 i.e. YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+{{UTC Timezone - 0530 for India}}