Many CallPlease Users rely on the their alarms and notifications to make certain they are on track and connected with their team all through the day. Both the CallPlease mobile apps and the CallPlease web app support notifications, utilizing the capabilities of the operating systems and browsers. Notifications can be very handy when you have them tuned to your needs and preferences!

That said, it can be really distressing when those notifications don’t work for some reason.  Unfortunately, the things that go wrong rarely have anything to do with CallPlease and tend to have more to do with how people are using or managing their smartphones.  Apple iOS and Android both offer their own combination of tools and switches for managing the behavior of alarms and notifications.  This post is meant as a guide to help you find your way through all the places that you can look to see how things are set.

Note, this involves parts of the operating systems controlled by Apple, Google, and sometimes Samsung so your experience may vary.

First, if it seems like notifications have just stopped working, try to delete and reinstall the CallPlease app.  All of the communications between the app and the operating system are set-up during installation.  If something gets broken, a reinstall is the most common and effective fix.

Now, let’s review those settings:

Add a Call

A typical Add a Call screen from a browser

When you add a new call to a Call Log there are a couple of settings of great importance to Notifications and Alarms.

IMPORTANT: You won’t see these controls if you don’t click the triangle next to Options. 

You do have the option to set a call time in the future. This will impact the order of the call in the list and when an Alarm would tell you to make the call.  You can force that a date and time must be added for a given Call Action (like Schedule Call ).

The check box for Is Call Urgent? will impact the order of the call in the Call Log, whether or not it appears in the Urgent tab and the conditions under which a user is notified.

The Notify Mobile Users check box does just that. If your notifications stop working, this is the first place to check.

User Profile

Every user can decide for themselves how much of the alarms and notifications are sent to their mobile apps.  These settings can be found under the User Profile menu at the upper righthand side corner of the web app.

On the device

The images below are for iOS v12.2

One place where things can go awry is the Allow Notifications  switch.  Evidently it is possible to inadvertently turn off notifications here. You can get to the same menu by navigating through Settings > Notifications > CallPlease.

Every permutation of iOS and Android will be a bit different.

We have also found some people having luck with correcting lost notifications by turning them off and then back on again.  This makes almost no sense from a programming perspective but you can’t hurt anything giving it a try.

In the CallPlease App

The last place to look is in the CallPlease App settings.

In the CallPlease app, there are three little dots in the upper righthand corner of the screen. Tapping here reveals four buttons: Refresh Call Data (in case you think things aren’t syncing fast enough – this can happen if you lose connectivity, but only for a moment), Mark All as Read, Settings and Cancel

Click on Settings to reveal the small subset of settings available through the app.

This reveals a full screen of options, including Update Profile and Set Alarms.

Update Profile

You can turn on and off the Default to “Notify Boss” switch here.  Turning this off would allow you to stop all in-coming call from defaulting to notifications being on.  Admittedly, this is buried a bit and has been a source for the missing notifications.

Execs, Assistants, and Shared Call Logs

There are distinct differences between what Execs can control, what the Assistants control and what anybody in a Shared Call Log controls. Execs have very fine controls for what they get notifications regarding (new calls, updates to calls, etc) and how often they are reminded that they have something to do about that call. Urgent notification reminders are in hours. Regular call reminders are set in days.

Set Alarms

You have a number of settings to fine tune how you want to be notified or reminded of new calls, scheduled calls and the like.

Once again, the level of customization here can also be construed as “enough rope to hang yourself” but we prefer you have as much flexibility as possible.