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Events and Notifications

Zuora

Events and Notifications

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The Events and Notifications feature provides capabilities for automatic communications with your customers. Notifications are triggered by standard events, custom events, or custom scheduled events. Email notifications are automatically sent to your customers from Zuora's default email server or your own SMTP server, whereas callout notifications send information to a specified web page or URL via an HTTPS call to an external web service. Both types of notifications provide information regarding Zuora standard events, custom events, or custom scheduled events.

Standard Events

Standard events are pre-defined business events for Zuora Billing, Zuora Payment, and Zuora Finance. See Standard Events for more information.

Custom Events

You can use the Zuora UI or Custom Event Triggers API to define custom events. To define a custom event, you must specify the base object and the trigger condition. When a Zuora object changes, the trigger condition defined on the object is evaluated. If the condition is satisfied, a business event will be triggered. See Custom Events for more information.

Custom Scheduled Events

You can use the Zuora UI or Custom Scheduled Events API to define custom scheduled events. To define a custom scheduled event, you must specify the base object, the object’s base field and the scheduled time (hour and minute).

Once you have defined a custom scheduled event, you can create notification definitions for it and further refine the event trigger by specifying the notification parameters, including the number of days and the date evaluation condition (before or after a specified number of days).

A custom scheduled event notification is evaluated at the scheduled time of the related scheduled event on a daily basis. If the date meets the combination of the base field and the notification parameters, the notification will be triggered immediately. See Custom Scheduled Events for more information.

Create and Edit Notifications

You can create or edit notifications for all event types through Zuora UI. See Create and Edit Notifications for the details.

In addition, you can use Notifications API to create, query, edit, or delete notifications for custom events. 

Manage Email Templates

You can use Email templates to manage the content of your email notification. You can create or edit email templates for all event types through Zuora UI. In the email template, you can insert merge field tags into the body to show the account-specific or subscription-specific information in the email notification. See Manage Email Templates and Email Template Merge Fields for the details.

In addition, you can use Notifications API to create, query, edit, or delete email templates for custom events and scheduled events. 

Configure Callout Notifications

You can create callout notifications for all event types through Zuora UI. See Configure Callout Notifications for the details.

In addition, you can use Notifications API to create, query, edit, or delete callout notifications for custom events and scheduled events. 

Communication Profiles

Communication profiles allow you to send specific event-driven notifications to targeted customer accounts. You can create a new profile and activate the specific notifications in this profile, and then associate this communication profile to the targeted customer accounts. The specific notifications in this profile are sent to your targeted customers when the event occurs.

You can create or edit a communication profile in Zuora UI. See Communication Profiles for the details.

In addition, you can also manage communication profiles through Settings API. See the following tutorials on how to operate on communication profiles through Settings API.

Configure Your Own SMTP Server

You can use your own SMTP server to send out email notifications instead of using Zuora's default email server. The benefits of using your own SMTP server are:

  • More control over emails delivered to your customers because messages are sent through your own server
  • Ability to access sent email records through your SMTP server logs
  • No need to whitelist Zuora email servers because messages are sent through your own server.

See Configure an SMTP Server for Email Notifications for more information.

Reporting on Notifications  

Notification histories based on all event types are available through Data Query, Data Source Exports, and AQuA API to facilitate reporting. Common use cases include:

  • Report on all emails that have failed to be sent, by event, customer name, or date
  • Report on all failed callouts, by event, consumer URL, or date

The history of emails and callouts sent by workflows that have the Customer Notification History setting enabled is also available in the report.

With this enhancement, notification histories can be accessed through the following approaches:

  • Querying one of the following tables through Data Query:
    • notificationhistorycallout
    • notificationhistoryemail
    • notificationhistoryemailevent

      See Available tables for Data Query for more information.

      See Data source availability for a list of all supported data sources.

Note

Zuora notification system processes the events in the same order in which they are triggered. The timing and order of callout notifications depend on various factors, such as callout retries, concurrency, and network latency. But Zuora guarantees the best performance possible with the right performance boosters and tuning.