How to Schedule Email, SMS and Staff Alerts

The Communications Scheduler lets you queue an email or SMS to go out at the right moment: a specific date and time, after a delay, or during business hours. Scheduled sends appear in the Dispatcher so you can review or cancel them before they go out.

Your workspace keeps two sets of hours, one for reaching customers and an optional one for alerting your own team. If you run an AI dialler on a narrow calling window, read Two sets of hours: customers and your own team below before you set anything.

Schedule an email

Open any contact record and start a new email as you normally would. Instead of clicking Send, click the dropdown arrow on the send button and choose Schedule send.

A modal will appear with four options:

• Send now — sends immediately (the default).
• At a specific time — pick a date, time, and timezone.
• After a delay — send X minutes, hours, or days from now.
• During business hours — TrustPager holds the send until the next available business-hours window in your contact's timezone (falls back to your company default).

Confirm your choice and click Schedule. The email is queued and will not leave until the scheduled time.

Schedule an SMS

Open the SMS conversation for your contact. The same schedule option is available in the message composer — click the calendar icon or the dropdown next to the send button to open the scheduling modal and pick your send time.

Review and cancel scheduled sends

All pending scheduled sends are visible in the Dispatcher at https://app.trustpager.com/inbox/dispatcher. From here you can see the scheduled time, channel, recipient, and current status. To cancel a send before it goes out, open the row and click Cancel.

Scheduled statuses you'll see:

• Pending — waiting for the scheduled time.
• Dispatched — handed off to the sending provider.
• Delivered — confirmed delivered.
• Undelivered — the provider could not deliver it.
• Cancelled — cancelled before dispatch.

Automatic cancellations (compliance)

TrustPager automatically cancels a pending scheduled send if any of the following happen before dispatch:

• The contact unsubscribes from email.
• The contact opts out of SMS.
• The contact replies to the conversation (email or SMS).
• The linked opportunity moves to Won or Lost.

This keeps you compliant without any manual intervention.

Business hours and timezone

When you choose During business hours, TrustPager works out the contact's local time in this order: the Timezone field on their contact record, then their State/Region, then the country code on their phone number, then your company's default timezone. You can set your company's default timezone at https://app.trustpager.com/settings/company.

Set the contact's Timezone whenever you know where they actually are. A mobile number is national, so it cannot tell us which state someone is in: every Australian mobile looks like the east coast. With neither a timezone nor a state on the record, a lead in Perth is treated as Sydney and can be contacted two to three hours earlier than you meant.

Both fields sit on the contact record at https://app.trustpager.com/crm/contacts. If you are importing contacts or setting them through the API, the Timezone field also accepts a state such as "WA" or "Western Australia" and stores the matching timezone for you.

Scheduling from automations

Every sending action in the automation builder can be told when it is allowed to send. Open the action and look for When should this send? near the bottom. It is available on:

• Send Branded Email
• Send SMS
• Send WhatsApp
• Notify Our Staff
• Voice Outbound Call

Three choices, and the middle one is the useful one:

• Send immediately — fires the moment the automation runs, at any hour. This is the default.
• Business hours only — sends straight away if you are inside your business-hours window, and otherwise holds it until the next one opens.
• After a delay — waits a set number of minutes first.

Anything other than immediate is queued rather than sent, so it appears in the Dispatcher exactly like a manually scheduled send, and the same automatic cancellation rules above apply to it.

(Picking an exact date and time is not offered here, because an automation action fires over and over. A fixed timestamp would be either in the past or arbitrarily far away. For a one-off timed send use the contact record, and for a recurring one use an Auto Schedule.)

Stop waking your team up at 3am

This is the setting most worth knowing about, and the one people most often miss.

If an automation alerts your team about a new lead, and leads can arrive at any hour, then by default that alert fires at 3am. Your team sees it, acts on it, and rings someone who is asleep. One client only discovered this after noticing their team was calling leads before 6am local time.

Set the alert to Business hours only and it waits for the morning instead. The alert still fires instantly during the day, so nothing urgent is slowed down.

Notify Our Staff also works out who to send to at the moment it actually sends, not when the trigger fired. So an alert held overnight reaches whoever is assigned in the morning.

Set your hours at https://app.trustpager.com/settings/inbox?section=dispatcher. They are per workspace.

Two sets of hours: customers and your own team

There are two separate sets of hours on that page, because they answer two different questions.

• Customer Contact Hours are when we may reach your customers. Scheduled emails, SMS, WhatsApp and AI dialler calls use these. They respect each lead's own timezone, which matters if you have leads in Western Australia and staff in Sydney.
• Staff Alert Hours are when we may alert your own team. Every internal alert uses these, and they run in your workspace timezone, because an alert to your team has no customer to take a timezone from. That covers Notify Our Staff, and also a Send Branded Email, Send SMS or Send WhatsApp action you have pointed at a fixed address of your own instead of at the contact.

Staff Alert Hours are optional. Leave them switched off and your team alerts simply follow your Customer Contact Hours, which is how it has always worked.

Switch them on when your calling window is narrower than your team's working day. The clearest case is an AI dialler: if you only let it ring leads between 10:00 and 11:00 and again from 15:30 to 17:30, then without separate staff hours every alert to your own team is stuck inside those same few hours too. A "call this customer back within 24 hours" alert that happens at lunchtime would sit silently until 15:30. Set Staff Alert Hours to your real working day and the alert arrives straight away, while the dialler keeps to its narrow window.

To turn them on, go to https://app.trustpager.com/settings/inbox?section=dispatcher, switch on Use separate hours for staff alerts in the Staff Alert Hours section, set the days and times, and save. To go back to using one set of hours, switch it off and save.

You can confirm which set an action will follow without leaving it: open the action, and the timing section shows the hours it will actually use, headed either Staff alert hours or Business hours.

Holidays are shared by both sets, since a public holiday closes both.

What counts as an internal alert

You do not set this anywhere. It follows the recipient you already chose on the action.

Notify Our Staff is always internal, whichever recipients you pick, because alerting your own team is all it does.

A Send Branded Email, Send SMS or Send WhatsApp action counts as internal when its recipient is a fixed address of your own rather than the contact. In the action, set the recipient to Custom and type your own address or number. That is already how you build an alert that must never reach the customer, so anything you have set up that way is treated as internal on its own.

Anything aimed at the contact, the account or the customer is a customer send. It follows your Customer Contact Hours in that lead's local time, exactly as before.

A WhatsApp group is the one exception. A group can be your own team's room or a chat with a client, and nothing in the setup says which, so a group send keeps the Customer Contact Hours.

So the choice between a Branded Email alert and Notify Our Staff is only about the message, not the timing. Use the Branded Email action when the alert should carry your branding and attachments, and Notify Our Staff when you want a plain message that goes to whoever is assigned at the time it sends.

Troubleshooting

• My scheduled send disappeared. Check if the contact unsubscribed, opted out of SMS, or replied to the conversation — automatic cancellation rules apply.
• Business hours sent at the wrong time. Verify the company default timezone at https://app.trustpager.com/settings/company and confirm the contact's phone number has the correct country code.
• A staff alert is being held far longer than expected. Your Customer Contact Hours are probably narrower than your working day, most often because an AI dialler is set to call within a short window. Set separate Staff Alert Hours at https://app.trustpager.com/settings/inbox?section=dispatcher. Open the action and check the timing section: it names the set of hours it will use, so you can see which one is holding it.
• I set Staff Alert Hours but the alert still follows the calling window. Open the action and read the heading above the hours. If it says Business hours rather than Staff alert hours, the action is still addressed to the contact, so it is being treated as a customer send: set its recipient to Custom and enter your own address or number. Also check that at least one day is switched on in Staff Alert Hours, because with every day switched off alerts fall back to your Customer Contact Hours.
• Scheduled send is stuck in Dispatched. The platform reconciles delivery status every 3 minutes. If it remains stuck after 24 hours it will be marked undelivered automatically.