Customer notifications
Upper sends automated SMS and email updates to your customers as their delivery progresses, plus a live tracking page — cutting 'where's my order' calls.
Upper sends automated SMS and email updates to your customers as their delivery moves through the day, and gives them a live tracking page that shows where things stand. Instead of fielding "where's my order?" calls, your customers get the update first — without any extra steps for your team once it's set up.
Everything lives under Manage > Settings, in the Notifications group. That group holds three pages that together control what your customers receive:
- Notifications — the messages themselves (email and SMS), what they say, and when they send.
- Smart Scheduling — quiet hours, so customers aren't messaged overnight.
- Branded Tracking — the look and content of the customer-facing tracking page.
Labels in Upper are configurable per workspace. This article uses the driver / Delivery defaults. A workspace set up for service businesses may instead show Technician / Service — for example "Out For Service" instead of "Out For Delivery." The features are the same either way.
How customer notifications work
Once you turn notifications on, Upper sends them automatically as drivers work their routes. There is no manual send.
Open the Notifications settings
Go to Manage > Settings and open the Notifications page. Its subtitle reads "Send Delivery updates to your customers via email or Text Message (SMS)."
Turn on a channel
Use the master toggles to enable Email delivery updates, Text Message (SMS), or both. When a channel is off, its message cards are hidden.
Choose which messages to send
Each channel offers the same set of event templates (see below). Enable the ones you want, edit the wording, and choose which stop types each one applies to.
Make sure each stop has contact details
A message only sends if the stop has the matching contact info — a phone number for SMS, an email address for email. Add these when you build the route or import them with your stops.
Let Upper send the updates
As drivers progress through their routes, Upper sends each enabled message at the right moment, and customers can open the tracking link in the message to follow along.
The messages you can send
Each channel — Email and SMS — offers the same four event templates. Turn each one on or off independently.
| Message | When it sends |
|---|---|
| Out For Delivery | When the stop is out for delivery |
| After Delivery | After the stop is completed successfully |
| Missed Delivery | When the stop could not be completed |
| Notify to Next Customer | A heads-up to the upcoming customer that the driver is approaching |
Notify to Next Customer only appears if your account has it enabled, so you may not see it on every account.
Each message card has its own enable toggle, an editable message (email also has an editable Subject), and a stop-type selector so you can control which kinds of stops trigger it. The stop-type options are Delivery, Pickup, and Stop.
Editing a message
Click the pencil on a message card to open the editor.
- Subject (email only) has a 50-character counter; it blocks saving if left empty.
- Message is multi-line. For SMS it shows a 140-character counter and tells you how many segments the message will use; the email editor instead notes that email is sent from
do-not-reply@upperinc.com. - Tags are clickable chips you drop into the text in
[Square Brackets]— for example[Company Name],[Customer Name],[Delivery Date],[Tracking Link], and[Arriving In]. You can use the same tag more than once. - What your customers will see is a live preview that fills the tags with sample data so you can check the wording before saving.
Keep SMS messages short. The 140-character counter shows how many segments a message uses, and longer messages can cost more to send. The tracking link does the heavy lifting — your customer taps it for the full picture.
For the exact list of tags and what each one fills in, see the notification variables reference linked below.
Page-level settings
Two settings at the top of the Notifications page apply to your messages overall:
- Company Name — set this once (it has a pencil to edit). It fills the
[Company Name]tag wherever you use it in a template. - Choose Date Format — controls how dates appear in your messages, with several formats to choose from (full weekday and long date, short date, numeric only, and more).
Channels: email and SMS
You can send on email, SMS, or both.
| Channel | Good for |
|---|---|
| Detailed updates and a branded layout | |
| SMS | Short, time-sensitive updates that get opened fast |
SMS has extra requirements. SMS is not available on the Starter plan, and turning it on can also require a depot address on your account ("Depot address is required to send SMS notifications"). SMS sending draws on a balance you manage through the Marketplace add-on. See "SMS pricing and how to purchase credits" below before you rely on it.
Quiet hours (Smart Scheduling)
The Smart Scheduling page ("Smart Notification Scheduling") lets you hold notifications during quiet hours instead of messaging customers overnight.
Turn on Enable Smart Scheduling, then set your Quiet Hours start and end times and choose whether the quiet window applies to SMS Notifications, Email Notifications, or both. You can also mark Exceptions — specific message types that should always send immediately and ignore quiet hours — and choose Skip Queued Notifications to discard messages that fall in the quiet window rather than send them when it ends.
The tracking page (Branded Tracking)
The link in your messages opens a live tracking page. The Branded Tracking page lets you customize it, organized into tabs:
- Branding — your company logo and brand colors.
- Content — greeting, thank-you message, footer, and support contact and links.
- Display — what to show: driver name and phone, ETA, delivery address, the map, and more.
- Features — interactive options such as letting customers message the driver or copy the link.
- POD — what proof of delivery to show after completion (photo, signature, notes, timestamp).
- Post-Delivery — social media links.
- Preview — a live preview of how the page will look with your current settings.
ETAs on the tracking page are based on historical traffic data. The tracking page itself is available on the Professional, Optimize, and Enterprise plans; on Professional it sends a dynamic tracking link with an updating ETA. The live driver-on-map view requires the Optimize or Enterprise plan — on Professional the map shows an upgrade prompt while the ETA still works.
For the full set of branding and display options, see "Customize the tracking page" and "Configure ETA display" below.
Branded sending (your own email and SMS)
The Notifications page includes a Branded Notification section ("Custom Email & SMS Configuration") where you can send from your own infrastructure — your own SMTP server for email and your own Twilio account for SMS. This section is plan-gated and shows an upgrade prompt if your account doesn't include it.
Troubleshooting and FAQ
Related
Create custom notification triggers
Upper sends customer notifications on four built-in events. You control the message, channel, and stop types per event; new trigger events go through support.
Customer replies to notifications
Replies to Upper's default notification sender aren't monitored. Connect your own email or SMS sender so customer replies reach you directly.