ElectricalBossPro Blog — Electrician App

The Arrived Text: Letting the Homeowner Know the Electrician Is at the Door

The doorbell is not always enough. The homeowner is on a call in the back office with headphones on. The garage is where the panel is, and the homeowner is upstairs. The customer is at work and the tech is meeting a tenant. The arrived text is the small message that says, plainly, “your electrician is here.”

Sent When the Tech Taps Start

The on-the-way text, covered in Automatic On-the-Way Texts From the Electrician App, tells the customer the van is coming. The arrived text closes the loop.

In ElectricalBossPro, when the tech arrives and taps Start on the job card, the customer gets an arrived text if they have that alert turned on. The tech does not send it by hand. Tapping Start is something they already do, and the text rides along with it.

Why Arrival Matters for Electrical Work

Electrical calls depend on access more than most service work. The panel is inside. The dead outlet is in the bedroom. The tripping GFCI is in the kitchen. A tech standing on the porch waiting for someone to notice the doorbell is losing time on every call.

An arrived text gets the homeowner to the door, the garage opener pressed or the basement door opened. For a customer who is home but busy, it is a polite nudge. For a customer who stepped out, it is a prompt to call the office and say “I'm five minutes away.”

When the Customer Isn't the One at Home

Plenty of electrical work happens at houses where the person paying is not the person opening the door:

• Rentals. The landlord or property manager wants to know the electrician arrived at the unit. The tenant opens the door.
• Busy homeowners. One spouse booked the call, the other is home. The booker still wants to know the tech showed up.
• Commercial accounts. The property manager or regional manager wants to know the electrician is on site at the gym or store.

The arrived text tells the right person at the right moment. Combined with the photos and notes the tech adds during the call, the person who is not there still gets a clear picture of the visit.

For tenant-occupied homes, a good access note pairs well with the arrived text. “Tenant expects a call 30 minutes ahead, landlord gets the arrival alert” tells the tech and the office exactly who hears what. The landlord does not have to call the tenant to ask whether the electrician made it, and the tenant is not surprised by a stranger at the door.

A Small Trust Builder

Homeowners are letting a stranger into their house to open their electrical panel. A text that says the electrician from your company has arrived, sent at the moment they show up, is reassuring. It confirms the person at the door is who they say they are and that your office knows where they are.

It also builds a habit. Customers who get the same night-before, on-the-way and arrived texts every visit come to expect that level of communication from your company. That is the kind of thing people mention when a neighbor asks who they use.

Let Customers Choose

The arrived text is one of three customer alerts, along with night before and when they're next. Customers choose which ones they want, so nobody gets texts they find annoying. Some homeowners want only the arrived text; some want all three; a few want none and prefer email.

Replies to any of those texts come back to the office through two-way texting. A homeowner who replies “come around to the side gate” reaches the office, and the office can pass it to the tech or add it to the access notes for next time.

Tap Start at the Door

The arrived text only works if the tech taps Start when they actually arrive. Tapping it from the previous driveway, or forgetting until halfway through the call, sends the text at the wrong time. Make it part of the routine: park, tap Start, grab the tools, walk to the door.

That one habit also starts the before photos, opens the checklist on inspection jobs and shows the office the call is underway. More on building those habits in Getting Your Electricians to Actually Use the App.

Every Visit Feels Handled

Between the night-before reminder, the on-the-way text and the arrived text, the customer never wonders what is going on. That is a quieter phone for the office and a smoother start to every call. To see the arrived text alongside the rest of the tech app, visit the ElectricalBossPro electrician app page.