Best practices for configuring your customer notifications

Customer notifications are email messages that your customers receive to let them know about activities on their requests. Set them up to notify people on what they need to know. Learn more about setting up notifications for your customers and team

In this article, we’ve provided some best practice guidelines for how to customize the look and feel, and content of your customer notifications to better suit your brand and your organization’s compliance needs.

Customize the style of your notifications

Your service project allows you to customize customer notifications by editing the subject line, header, footer, colours and logos to suit your brand.

You must be a project administrator to style your notification templates.

1. From your service project, select Project settings, then Notifications, then Customer notifications.

2. Under Templates, select Edit templates.

3. Under Styles, select CSS, then copy and paste our sample CSS code from here.

4. Preview the template on the same page and adjust your code as you need. If you’ve used the sample CSS code, it should appear similar to the image above.

5. Select Send me a test email and check the email styling in your inbox.

6. Select Save.

Learn more about changing the look and feel of customer notifications

Sample customer notification

Get started with this sample customer notification by copying the sample CSS code and using it on your Templates page. The sample CSS code is intended as a starting point for designing and writing customer notification emails. The sample customer notification may display differently depending on which browser or email client is used to view it.

Notifications for compliance

If your organization needs to meet compliance requirements, for example, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), your site admins will need to enable the safe customer notifications setting which has an impact on your service project.

When the safe customer notification setting is enabled on your site, sensitive information such as protected health information (PHI) will be hidden from the outgoing email notifications generated from your service project. Learn more about safe customer notifications

Review and edit the content of your notifications

To avoid customer confusion, we suggest you to edit the notifications in your service project for which contain the following issue variables because data from these components will appear as [●●●●●] in the email notifications.

• Issue summary

• Issue description

• Comment

You must be a project administrator to edit the content of your customer notifications:

1. From your service project, select Project settings, then Notifications, then Customer notifications.

2. Choose the notification you want to edit, then select Edit.

3. Under Content, edit the message.

4. For Public comment added and Public comment edited notifications, consider using a generic message to replace the default. By default, those two notifications contain the issue variable ${comment}.

Sample generic message

Hi {recipient},

There's an update on your request from {portal name}. To view the update, select View request below to log in to the portal.

Learn more about creating and editing the content of your customer notifications

Include a privacy disclaimer

To enforce an extra layer of security in your outgoing email notifications, we suggest you to include a privacy disclaimer as a footer in your templates.

1. From your service project, select Project settings, then Notifications, then Customer notifications.

2. Under Templates, select Edit templates.

3. Under Styles, select Plain text, then scroll to the bottom part of the editor and enter the content of your privacy disclaimer.

4. Select Save.

Sample privacy disclaimer

The information in this message may contain confidential data protected by laws. It is intended only for the use of the person(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient, contact the sender and destroy all copies of the original message.