Preferred contact times for customers and leads
Some customers would rather hear from you at particular times: a landlord who only picks up before the lunchtime service, a shop that takes supplier calls on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a bar manager who isn't in until the afternoon. Breww lets you record a preferred contact time against each customer and lead, made up of the days of the week they like to be contacted and a from/until time window. Wherever your team is about to pick up the phone, Breww shows the window and whether the customer is contactable right now, so calls land when the customer wants them.
Setting a preferred contact time
Open the customer or lead and stay on the Overview tab. In the sidebar, alongside Delivery windows, you'll find the Preferred contact time card. Select the pencil icon on the card to open Edit preferred contact time, then fill in:
- Days: select the days of the week the customer likes to be contacted. Leave every day unselected if any day is fine.
- From and Until: the time window on those days. Leave either side blank to keep it open-ended. For example, a From of 14:00 with Until left blank means any time after 14:00, and an Until of 12:00 on its own means any time before midday. When both are set, Until must be later than From.
Select Save. Days and times can be used together or on their own, so "Tuesdays and Thursdays" with no times, or "before 11:00" on any day, are both valid.
You can also edit the window from the customer's quick view sidebar: select the pencil icon on the Overview card to open Edit overview, and the same Days, From and Until fields are at the bottom under Preferred contact time. This is handy when you learn a customer's preference part-way through a call list and don't want to leave the page.
Users with sales permissions can edit a preferred contact time.
How the window is shown
The Preferred contact time card summarises the window in a single line, for example:
- Mon and Fri, 10:00 to 18:00
- Any day, after 14:00
- Fri, before 12:00
- Tue, Wed and Thu (when only days are set)
Times follow your brewery's time format, so a US brewery sees 2:00 PM where a UK brewery sees 14:00. When nothing has been recorded, the card reads Not set.
Next to the summary, a badge tells you at a glance whether this is a good moment to get in touch:
- Contactable now (green): today is one of the customer's days and the current time is inside their window.
- Outside preferred time (grey): either today isn't one of their days, or the current time is before From or after Until.
The badge is judged on your brewery's current local time (see Address, language, timezone & formatting), so it reads the same for everyone on your team regardless of where they are working from.
In the customer quick view
The quick view sidebar, which you can open from customer lists, customer list workflows, tasks and elsewhere in Breww, leads its Overview card with a Preferred contact time row showing the same summary and badge. This puts the answer to "should I call them now?" in front of you before you dial.
On customer list workflows
Preferred contact times come into their own on customer list workflows, where a rep works through a list of customers over a day, week or month. On the workflow page:
- Customers are listed in order of when their window opens, so the earliest calls come first. Customers with no window set are listed last.
- Each row shows the customer's window, for example "Contact Mon and Thu, 10:00 to 12:00", in the Contacts column.
- The Only contactable now button at the top of the page narrows the list to the customers whose window contains the current time, so you can ring straight down the list. Customers with no preferred contact time are always included, as they can be contacted at any time.
See the "Calling customers at the right time" section of the customer list workflows guide for the details.
Keeping track of changes
Changes to a customer's preferred contact days and times are recorded in the customer's change history, alongside changes to their other details. To see who changed a window and when, open the customer and choose More actions -> View recent change history.