How to keep customers updated on job progress

Last updated: September 2026

Silence is the complaint

Read reviews for any trades business and the pattern is consistent. Customers forgive a delay, a part that takes a week, even a return visit. What they do not forgive is not being told.

That is good news, because silence is much cheaper to fix than speed. You do not have to be faster than your competitors. You have to be the one who said what was happening.

The mistake is thinking this means constant contact. It does not. Four moments carry almost all of the value.

The four moments

1. When the visit is booked. In writing, with the date, so the customer has something to point at rather than a memory of a phone call.
2. When anything moves. A visit changing day is the single most annoying surprise in this trade, and the one most likely to produce a bad review.
3. When the job is waiting on something. “Your part is due Thursday” turns a customer wondering if they have been forgotten into a customer waiting patiently.
4. When it is finished. What was done, in plain terms, ideally with a photograph. This also pre-empts half of all invoice queries.

Cover those four and you will sound more organised than businesses twice your size, without adding a single phone call to your day.

Write it down, do not ring it in

A phone call is warm and leaves no record. When a customer says “you told me Tuesday”, a text or an email settles it in seconds and a call does not.

Written updates are also asynchronous, which matters more than it sounds: you can send them between jobs, and the customer reads them when convenient. Neither of you loses fifteen minutes to a conversation about a two-line fact.

Keep the wording plain and specific. “We are waiting on the pump, the supplier says Thursday, we will book you in the same week it arrives” is a complete update and takes twenty seconds to write.

Where Dispatch fits

Two mechanisms cover the four moments.

Appointment emails. Tick to email the customer when booking, and they get a branded confirmation when the visit is booked, moved to a different day or cancelled. That is moments one and two handled automatically, and the screen tells you honestly when a customer has no email address on file rather than pretending it sent.

Job chat. A two-way message thread about the job, with photographs, opened by sending the customer a link over WhatsApp or text. No account, no password. Staff post as the business rather than as a named person, so a customer replying at nine in the evening is not messaging an engineer privately. The thread closes itself when the job is completed or cancelled, and stays readable afterwards.

The customer side of the chat checks for new messages every ten seconds or so, which is quick but not instant, and it is not a replacement for ringing someone about something urgent.

For the fourth moment, the completion report with photographs is written on site and lives on the job, so the answer to “what did you actually do” is already recorded when the invoice is queried.

What it will not do

There are no text message alerts and no push notifications to customers. Everything outbound to a customer is either an email or a link you send yourself from your own phone, which is deliberate: a small business texting from its own number gets answered, and a bulk messaging system usually does not.

There is also no automated progress tracker for the customer to watch, and no live technician tracking map. For domestic trades work that is a feature rather than a gap, because an accurate two-line message beats a map showing a van stuck in traffic.

A script you can reuse

Most businesses get the benefit from three short messages, written once and reused.

Booking: “Booked you in for Tuesday 14th, morning. Any problem with access, reply here.” Delay: “Update: the part is due Thursday. I will confirm a slot as soon as it lands.” Completion: “All done. Replaced the isolator and tested the circuit, photographs attached. Invoice to follow today.”

Consistency beats eloquence. The customer is not judging the prose, they are noticing that you told them. If you want the next step after that, handling customer communication better covers the awkward conversations rather than the routine ones.