On December 14th, the Zuora Community hosted a product session with Shakir Karim, VP of Product Management where he highlighted 4 powerful Events and Notifications features you should be leveraging in Zuora and also gave a sneak preview of Zuora’s new email template experiences.
Through Zuora’s shared events and notifications service, application owners don’t need to build their own events framework or notification service. Rather, we send notifications via email or webhooks for
- Standard Events - Out of box events, default templates, and is a seeded notification
- Custom Events - Triggered based on create, update and delete of records and is a custom notification
- Custom Scheduled Events - Triggered daily based on defined scheduled, evaluates accounts that meet the event criteria, and is a custom notification.
Using this service, we’ve developed 4 events and notifications features you might not know about that will not only help you with your Zuora experience, but also elevate the customer experience to a new level.
⇒ Review the presentation slides here and the full session video here.
1. Communication Profiles
Learn more: video
Communication profiles are leveraged as a grouping mechanism for a set of notifications (definitions), and can be used for translations and branding.
Features include:
- For translations / localizations, matches the communication profile assigned at an account level
- One click MUTE allows you to easily block any notifications from going out (implementation / testing mode)
- Leverage deployment manager or settings API to GET/PUT/POST all notification definitions by a given communication profile
- New “number” field, aka Natural Key allows for easier matching across tenants
Email Send Options - Learn more: video | documentation
- Zuora Default Email Relay / SMTP - Our legacy default email server is sending notifications out of Zuora.
- External SMTP - Set up to send notifications to your SMTP server for sending out, requires you to configure either or both of SPF and DKIM to ensure it is not tagged as spam. Be sure to use a vendor that doesn't have a rate limit.
- Advanced SMTP (PREFERRED!) - No-cost option to sending email securely (DMARC / DKIM), runs globally, and at scale. Powered by Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES) pre-integrated with Zuora - the Advanced SMTP server requires no partnership or integration work from your side.
2. Triaging Events & Notifications
Learn more: video
Zuora provides two experiences to triage events and notifications: the system health dashboard and administration: notifications. Each option takes a snapshot of the event as opposed to rerunning the event which creates new data.
System Health Dashboard
Allows you monitor notifications via a scorecard with emails sent/failed, callouts sent/failed and filter by data set that will automatically update your scorecard and metrics graphically. The dashboard also provides a table where you can review the details of each failure.
Administration: Notifications
From the System Health Dashboard, one can click on a failed notification which directs you to the administration: notifications page where you can resend the notification - emails and callouts. From this page, one can search, sort, filter and select the action you’d like to take.
3. Bounced Email Reporting
Learn more: video
We now ingest bounce errors from the email provider if your destination was reachable (a.k.a. bounced error). Some highlights:
- Requires you to be on either Zuora default email server or Advanced SMTP server (if you choose your own SMTP, you are responsible for your own bounce error analysis)
- If any email addresses were bounced, we will present as Failed with error reason of “Bounced email address(s): email address(es)
- We also include any additional details sent from the SMTP provider to help you further triage (aka it may be because their inbox is full, it may be because they no longer exist, etc)
- Rendered on the Email History tab on the account, under Administration and under System Health dashboard.
- “Status” and “Failure Reason” are also reportable.
4. Reporting on Notification History
Learn more: video
The unified notification history store allows the capability for our users to run a number of reports:
- Data Query - Notification History for Callouts and Emails exposed in data query, allowing a user to extract historical events by date, status and other columns.
- Data Source Reporting & Exports - Data Sources “notificationHistoryEmail” and “notificationHistoryCallout”allow reporting of all notification history (by account, status, event, date, etc).
- Notification History APIs - Bulk (List) Callout and Email Notification History APIs available, along with AQuA / Data Query API access for notification history extract. If transformations required on extract, use Zuora Workflow.
- System Health Dashboard Export - One-click download via CSV button available within System Health dashboard enabling simple send/share to devops teams to assist in triage.
Coming in Early 2024: New Email Template UX
Learn more: video | documentation
We’re excited to share that we will be releasing a new email template builder!
Features include:
- Drag and drop
- More content types (Columns, Button, Menu, and more)
- More style options
- Multi-screen email preview
- Backward compatibility
- AI built (language help, spell check, image selection)
- Custom Objects support
- Summary Tables
- Functions (filterBy, map, groupby)
- Logic Control & Looping
⇒Watch the demo
Watch Session Video in Full
Let’s Collaborate in the Events and Notifications Group
Looking forward to trying out some of the features mentioned in this session? We want to hear about your experience as we’re always looking to capture your feedback on areas you want us to invest in and/or ask us questions on our events and notifications framework. Join us in the Events and Notifications Community group where you can share your experiences - what’s working well and what’s not - so that we can work together.