Getting your drivers on the app

A driver exists on your roster whether or not their login works — the record and the login are deliberately two things, so somebody can be scheduled, dispatched and paid on their first morning while their email is still being sorted out. This is how you get them onto the app, and what to do about the four or five who will have trouble.

The roster comes to you

Once the sync has run, most of your drivers are already in People, matched against Amazon’s roster by transporter id. What you add by hand is the person Amazon does not know about yet. The panel at the foot of People shows every difference between Amazon’s list and yours, with a press for each one.

Inviting them

People › a driver › Detail › App access

1. 1

   Check the email address on their record first.

   This is the one thing worth ten seconds. An invite goes wherever the address says, and a typo is a link nobody ever receives.

2. 2

   Press Send an invite.

   Their card then says they have been invited, and who sent it.

3. 3

   Send the sign-in guide with it.

   There is a short illustrated page for drivers at /guide/signin on your own portal address, and a second one at /guide/app for the app itself. Both work without signing in — which is the point, because the person reading them cannot get in yet.

You can invite the whole tab at once from the Active list rather than one at a time. Everybody except a terminated driver can hold a login: somebody suspended for a few days is still employed and their link will very likely outlive the suspension.

The link lives 24 hours, and that is the thing that catches people out

The five ways somebody is locked out

They all look identical on a phone — “I can’t get in” — and each has a different cure, so the first job is to say which one it is. Their card on the profile answers most of it before you have to ask them anything.

The link expired

Their card says so in red. Send another one.

They opened a link and never chose a password

The card says exactly that, in amber. Resending the invite will not help — send a reset link instead.

The link was used by a machine

A preview or a scanner fetched it first. Copy the invite link instead of emailing it (below).

Their access is switched off

They have a working password and still cannot get in. Their profile says so.

They were offboarded

The sign-in itself is refused, and their record says when and by whom.

One habit worth keeping: read their card before sending a second link. Sending one restarts the clock and destroys the evidence for the first, so you lose the thing that would have told you which of the five it was.

The driver whose email eats the link

Some mail systems and chat apps fetch a link to draw a preview of it — and because the link is a one-use credential, the preview spends it. We proved this: a link pasted into a chat box died the moment it was pasted, before anybody tapped anything, and crossing the preview out does not give it back.

So use Copy invite link on their card and hand that over — text it, or read it out. A copied link goes to a page with one button on it, and nothing is checked until that button is pressed, so a scanner’s look cannot burn it. Emailed links stay one tap, because there the driver’s own tap is the first fetch.

Getting it onto their phone

It installs from a link — there is no app store and no update for anybody to chase, because the app is the website and it updates itself. On Android, Chrome offers to install it. On an iPhone it is Share › Add to Home Screen, and on iPhone that step is not optional if you want notifications: Apple only permits them for an app added to the home screen. The driver guide walks through both with pictures.