For companies who often work with a network of vendors (e.g. a vendor panel), determining who's available to work an assignment is often a difficult and tedious task. Traditionally, this involves making phone calls or emailing investigators or 3rd parties to determine if they have qualified staff that are available to work an assignment on a given day. If you often find yourself in this situation, Trackops offers a handy "Invitations" feature to quickly and easily capture investigator availability.
Sending New Invitations
To get started, you first need to create a task or event for the upcoming assignment. Once you've created the activity, click the Invitations tab at the top. From here, click New Invitations, and choose the investigators you wish to invite.
Note: If this activity is connected to a case, you can add preferred investigators for the client to quickly find investigators that are approved to work.
- Response Deadline - This is the date and time that all responses must be received. Investigators who attempt to respond after this deadline will be denied.
- Requirements - Any additional notes, job duties, or other investigative requirements that an investigator will need to know before deciding if they are available or unavailable to work this assignment.
- Investigators are then broken down into several categories, for ease of use. If the related activity includes a physical address, the state or province will be used to group "Licensed" investigators.
- Preferred (Licensed)
- Preferred (Not Licensed)
- Nearby (Licensed)
- Nearby (Not Licensed)
- All (Licensed)
- All (Not Licensed)
Choose the investigator(s) you wish to invite and click Send Invitations to let them know you'd like their availability on an upcoming assignment. At this point, the system will send the selected investigators an Event Invitation Email, containing special links to respond to the invitation.
Changing Invitation Details
If at any time, you wish to change the response deadline, update the invitation requirements, or disable the invitation altogether, you can easily do so by clicking the change button next to the invitation response status.
Capturing Invitation Responses
When an investigator receives an invitation, they can click the unique invitation link inside to respond. To respond, an investigator can choose Available or Unavailable, as well as leave additional comments or notes.
By default when an invitation response is captured, the case manager on the case is sent an Event Invitation Response Notice to alert them of the response. If the activity is not connected to a case, the response notification is delivered to the general notification email instead.
Note 2: Tasks and events with "Open" invitations can be monitored on your dashboard via the task or event watcher.
Assigning Invitation Respondents
Once an investigator (or investigators) has responded, the manager can now assign the investigator to the task or event from the invitation screen. To do so, navigate to the activity in question, click the Invitations tab at the top, and see which respondents are available.
To assign an investigator, simply check the boxes next to the desired respondents and click the Assign button above.
The system will confirm your selection, and then these investigator(s) will be assigned to the task/event, as well as the connected case (if applicable). In addition, you can modify two additional options:
- Disable Invitation Responses - This option effectively closes this invitation and prevents other investigators from responding.
- Decline other "Available" Investigators - After you've assigned an investigator, it's usually best practice to let other willing investigators know that the assignment has been filled by someone else. You can customize the Event Invitation Decline Notice in your email settings and templates configuration.
Using invitations is a great way to save time and maintain a positive rapport with your vendor panels by making it easy for investigators to post availability on upcoming assignments!