Texting and email

What texting and email do

Trussi lets your office send texts and emails to a customer straight from their project, and see their replies come back, without anyone using a personal phone or a personal email account. Every message, in either direction, is kept with the project it belongs to instead of scattered across someone's phone.

Where the messages live

A project's Communications tab, under Overview, is where every text and email thread with that customer lives, alongside internal job notes and, if your account has them connected, other message channels like Messenger or WhatsApp. Filters at the top let you look at everything at once, or narrow to just Emails or just Text Messages. A customer's reply, to either a text or an email, comes back into the same thread automatically rather than starting a new one.

Sending a text

From the Communications tab, start a text and Trussi sends it from the account's own texting number. A text is plain text only: there is no attaching a photo or a document to a text message, so a text works for a quick update or reminder, and email or the project's other tabs handle anything that needs a file attached. If a text arrives from a number Trussi cannot match to an existing project, it does not disappear: it shows up on the home dashboard for someone who can manage the unmatched inbox to review and connect it to the right customer.

Sending an email

Sending an email from a project does not need a company email domain set up anywhere in Trussi: every account already sends through Trussi's own email system, so there is nothing extra to connect before you can start emailing customers. Every email is signed automatically. Your name, job title, profile photo and your company's logo are appended below the message, pulled from your own user profile and the company name on the account, so there is no separate signature to type each time. You can attach a photo, a document already on the project, or a company document to an email; a text cannot carry attachments.

What a phone number requires

Before anyone can text a customer, the account needs its own texting number, and that is a one-time setup job. Open your user menu in the top right corner, choose Settings, then Add-ons, and open the Twilio card. Connecting asks for your company's legal business name, EIN, business type and industry, address, an authorized company representative, and at least two sample messages showing how you plan to text customers, because U.S. carriers require every business to register before it can send texts. Trussi submits that registration for you; once it is approved, buy a phone number from the same screen and either leave it as the account's default or assign it to specific branches, so a multi-location company can give each location its own number.

Texting compliance is built into the number

Registering a number also registers the standard opt-out and help keywords as part of that same submission: STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END and QUIT all unsubscribe a customer automatically, and HELP returns a short message explaining how to opt out. None of that is something your office has to build or remember: a customer who texts STOP is unsubscribed automatically, and no further texts will reach that number until they text START again.

Email footers

Email Footers, reached from account settings under General, is a separate, real configurable: a promotional or referral block, a heading, body text, a button and an optional image, that your account can turn on. It appears beneath Trussi's automated customer notification emails (payment receipts, invoices, appointment confirmations, project updates and more), never on an email your team writes by hand from a project's Communications tab, and never on a security email like a password reset or a portal invite. You can set one default block for every eligible notification, override it for specific notification types, or turn it off for those, and optionally limit the whole thing to a date range for a seasonal promotion.

Who can do this

Opening a project's Communications tab to read what is there takes View on Project Comment, which most roles carry by default. Actually sending a text takes the narrower Create on SMS, and sending an email takes Create on Email; by default those two are granted only to Account Admin, Back Office, PM and Branch Manager, not to Subcontractor or Crew Lead. Connecting a texting number and changing Email Footers both take Modify on Account, an account-admin task.