What happens after automated outreach: the customer's response
Automated Outreach sends the customer a short series of messages (reminders) asking them to approve and schedule the upcoming recurring service. What happens next depends on their reply, and every outcome comes back to you as a Recurring Services task on the Tasks page - Essential does NOT schedule the visit for you.
Approved or Declined: the answer is recorded as a task, and for an approved service you schedule the visit yourself from that task. Ask Someone Else: the customer points you to a different contact, whose details are saved on the task for you to follow up - but Essential does NOT automatically send a new outreach to them.
Unanswered: if no one responds within a few days, the outreach stops on its own and files an Unanswered task. Email Bounced: the email could not be delivered, so a Bounced task is created for you to fix the contact's email and try again. A text that fails to deliver does not stop the outreach and does not create a task as long as an email (or an earlier text) reached the contact or is still on its way; the remaining messages still go out as scheduled. Only when nothing has reached the contact at all, such as a text-only outreach whose texts all failed, does the failed text stop the outreach and file the Bounced task.
A late answer still counts. If the customer opens the link after the outreach stopped as Unanswered or Bounced, their answer is accepted, recorded as the usual Approved, Declined, or Ask Someone Else task, and the Unanswered or Bounced task is advanced by your task automations. The link only stops accepting answers once you end the request yourself: stopping the automation, or sending it again to the same or a different contact. The customer then sees that the link has expired and who to contact.
Whenever one of those tasks is filed, the recurring service moves to Awaiting Service Completion until the work is recorded, so the automation won't keep re-sending.
Where to find it: The reply comes back as a Recurring Services task on the Tasks page; the asset group's Next Automation card shows the in-progress outreach
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