You can message your suppliers to provide updates, share documents, raise issues or ask any questions.
How to send a Direct Message to a supplier
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Communications hub
You can see messages between suppliers and your organisation in your Communications hub. This includes messages sent on Opportunities and directly to the supplier from their profile page. To get to your Communications hub, click 'My Messages' on your Homepage or navigate to 'My account' > 'My messages' from the navigation bar.
Note: Level D & E users can view all account messages with suppliers, but cannot respond, manage or close threads. Level D users can view, respond, close and manage participants on Opportunity message threads where they are a member of the team. Learn more about user permissions here.
The Communications hub allows you to easily view and respond to your messages.
From the Communications hub:
- Use the search bar to find a particular message thread.
- Choose 'All' to see all messages with your organisation or choose 'My messages' to see only message threads that you are a participant on.
- Sort by latest/oldest message.
- See how many messages have been sent per thread.
- See who sent the last message (yellow marker is a supplier, teal is you or a colleague) and the time they sent it.
Use the filtering options on the left to filter by:
- Participant: View messages sent to a specific member of your team.
- Status: View either open or closed message threads.
- Message on: View account messages or messages sent on Opportunities.
- Last message by: View message threads where the latest response is from a member of your client team or a supplier.
TIP! Use this filter to quickly find messages from your suppliers that you need to respond to.
Sending a message
1. From a supplier's Company Profile, navigate to the Account Management section, open the Direct Messages module and click 'Start new thread'.
2. Choose which of your colleagues and which members of the supplier's team should be included as 'Participants' on the thread. This means that they will receive an email notification each time a new message is sent on the thread.
Note: You don't need to add yourself as you will automatically be added as a participant once you send the message.
3. Complete the message fields and upload any relevant documents, click 'Send message'. You will be taken to your Communications Hub.
Responding to a message
Any time a new message is sent on a thread that you are a part of, you will get an email that notifies you.
You can respond to any message on IAND by clicking reply on the open message thread. You can find your existing messages either in your Communications hub or directly on a supplier's Company Profile.
Closing out a thread
Once your update has been acknowledged or question answered, you can close out a messaging thread. Open the message and click 'Close thread' in the top right.
TIP! All you need to get started is for the supplier to be live on IAND (see this IAND Academy guide for more on how to invite a supplier).
TIP! Read this IAND Academy guide to understand why you may want to message your suppliers.
