What each channel is good at
- Text — highest reach, immediate, ideal for date changes and arrival notice.
- Email — good for documents and longer explanations, easily buried.
- Portal — persistent, self-service, answers repeat questions without staff time.
Where text-only breaks
Text works beautifully until the job runs long or more than one person is involved. Then the thread becomes the record, the record lives on one phone, and the answer to 'what did we tell them?' depends on who is holding it.
It also scales badly in one direction: every repeat question consumes a person. Ten jobs is fine. Sixty jobs turns the office into a status desk.
Where portal-only breaks
A portal is passive. It cannot make a customer look, so news that needs to be known — a date change, an access requirement, a payment due — never reaches the people who did not check. Publishing is not informing.
The pattern that works
- Push the event: date set, date changed, crew dispatched, work complete.
- Park the detail: status, documents, dates, history, all durable in one place.
- Never make the customer choose a channel to learn something important.