Keeping Customers Informed

Order management goes beyond placement and processing; it involves keeping customers informed with timely updates and on-demand access to order status. Liferay provides various features to facilitate this throughout the entire order lifecycle, including automated notifications and self-service tools. By using these tools strategically, you can build transparency, reduce support costs, and boost customer confidence.

This lesson explores how to push order status updates via notifications and provide self-service views for customers.

Creating and Sending Notifications

Liferay Commerce’s notifications keep users informed about important events in the order, shipment, and return lifecycles. They’re triggered automatically by status changes and sent via configured communication channels (e.g., email). Clear and timely notifications build trust and reduce confusion.

Common automated notifications include:

Liferay provides two complementary features to create and send these notifications:

• Notification Templates: Define the content and structure of the message, identifying the sender, recipients, and message body. Liferay provides both email and user notification templates. These can be configured to send messages to individual users, roles, or User Groups, enabling you to notify the correct set of users when important order or return events occur.
• Object Actions: Define the trigger logic on the Commerce Order or Commerce Return system objects (e.g., “On Status Update”) to send a specific template when an event occurs.

Both features work together to automate informational alerts to customers.

As a best practice, use object actions whenever possible as they provide superior control over trigger events.

Enabling Self-Service Order Access

Customers expect to check of their orders without contacting support. Providing self-service order views improves transparency and empowers buyers to monitor their purchases on demand.

In Liferay Commerce, self-service order access is typically provided through Order Pages. These pages display order information using display page templates, page building tools, or an Order Data Set fragment to present order records in a structured format with searching and filtering capabilities.

By default, two primary order pages are available:

• Pending Orders: Displays active, unsubmitted carts. This enables buyers to review details and finalize checkout for each in-progress order.
• Placed Orders: Lists submitted orders and full historic order records. When using an Orders Data Set fragment, buyers can drill down into individual orders to to view billing details, purchased items, and a dedicated Shipping tab containing tracking numbers and delivery estimates.

Out-of-the-box site templates (e.g., Minium) include these order pages by default. To ensure comfortable storefront experiences for your users, place these pages in predictable navigation locations, such as an account dashboard. Consider taking the Mastering Storefronts with Liferay course to learn more about crafting storefront pages.

Best Practices for Keeping Customers Informed

When planning your strategy to keep customers informed, follow these best practices:

• Simplify Notifications: Focus only on key milestones to avoid alert fatigue (e.g., Accepted, Shipped, Delivered). Use clear, simple language that aligns with your brand tone to ensure immediate understanding.
• Don’t Overload pages: Avoid cluttering pages by grouping too many components together. Instead, place widgets like Orders and Returns on separate, dedicated pages.
• Ensure Information Consistency: Ensure statuses shown in self-service views match the ones communicated in notifications, reducing confusion.
• Test Thoroughly: Confirm notification triggers, templates, and conditions work correctly before going live. Additionally, ensure your self-service pages accurately display all expected information.

By following these best practices, you can ensure reliable, transparent communication with your customers.

Clarity’s Customer Communication Approach

Clarity recognizes that notifying customers and providing self-service methods are crucial for helping buyers track order information efficiently. Currently, they provide dedicated self-service pages for tracking orders and returns in their B2C and B2B storefronts. While this method is valuable for better communication, their customers still don’t receive timely updates.

To solve this, Clarity plans to configure email notifications using object actions so that buyers are informed of key order events like approval, shipment, and delivery. Additionally, they will configure notifications to communicate the status of requested returns, such as processing and final resolution. By implementing these automated alerts, Clarity empowers buyers to easily track the status of orders and returns even when they’re not actively browsing the website.

Conclusion

In today’s digital commerce landscape, timely communication and self-service are essential to meet customer expectations. By leveraging Liferay’s automated notification engine and configurable self-service widgets, you can keep customers informed throughout the entire fulfillment journey.

Next, you’ll review what you’ve learned before moving on to the next module.