January was a busy month for us, we completed a number of customer requests and a few stand out.
A sales based customer wanted to allow their salespeople to “text in” stop descriptions such as “stopped at Joe’s Convenience Store to stock the shelves with our product.”
So we now allow our customers to associate their drivers’ everyday cell phones with that vehicle, so that when they text in “gps note here is my note” it will asssociate the “here is my note” (or whatever they text) with that stop.
What’s better is you can see the note appear within seconds on our real time updating maps.
The red or yellow stop icon for that vehicle changes in real time to show an envelope, indicating a note.
I am going to send a note via my cell phone right now, saying “gps note I am at home blogging about GPS Insight.”
Before I send it, here is the picture of my vehicle (and my wife’s, down the street at our neighbor’s) with a couple of red icons (stopped for > 1 hour) .
Now that I’ve sent the note, I can see the new icon style with the envelope, and click on it for more details, as well as the ability to rapidly send a text message to that vehicle, check its history for the recent 3 days, or create a landmark around it:
Also, I can associate a note with another vehicle (in this case, my wife’s vehicle) by sending “gps navigator [or nav for short] note at the neighbor’s” — this allows you to easily “tag” a vehicle in your fleet with either notes or the ability to go back and check on its history, perhaps if you’re out of the office and curious where someone is at that time. Of course you can just request their address/landmark/stop time/speed by texting “gps vehiclename” where vehiclename is the name of the vehicle in question.
Here’s the new note for the Navigator:
Now if I want to be alerted via text message to when that vehicle starts up to leave, I can text “gps nav parked” and it will begin to monitor that vehicle, sending me a message when it starts up. This is convenient if you are waiting for someone to leave to go to the next stop but don’t want to sit and watch the screen for movement.
Of course, you need to be “logged in” via your cell phone in order to use these and other cell phone capabilities. You do so simply by sending a text message of “gps login username password” where username/password are yours. You also need to sign up for this enhanced capability, which usually costs between $2 and 4 per vehicle per month. At that point you can use any of these capabilities, which are really helpful for some of our customers and for us.
Now I know when my wife will be headed home. That reminds me of a “would-be” customer from years ago who called us to buy a unit to put in his Dad’s car so he would know when he was almost home. The kid seemed like he was in high school. Pretty funny, but we don’t sell for non-commercial purposes, so I guess he has to listen for the garage door like everybody else who doesn’t have GPS Insight…
Bear in mind we’ve got detailed specifications and instructions available at http://support.gpsinsight.com/wiki/support/how_do_i_locate_my_vehicles_using_cell_phone_text_messaging
Here is an update — we now show these notes on our newer stop detail report here:
Clicking on the “show on a map” icon brings up the following screen:
