Alerts & Notifications Overview

Introduction

Have you ever forgotten to attend a meeting? 

Have you ever left a task pending?

Have you been curious whether your customers have opened your emails?

These are a few reasons that prove you need notifications.

Alerts and Notifications provide timely, automated reminders about your events and tasks and notify you about your mentions and emails. This enables you to take the right actions at the right time. 

Vtiger CRM helps you create, manage, and track alerts. You can receive notifications when different events occur. For example, when a meeting is due in a day, or a deal’s closing date arrives, or a contact replies to your email.

In this article, you will learn about,

1. Types of notifications you can set
2. Channels where you can receive notifications

Let us learn about them briefly. 

Notifications Types

On a typical working day, there can be many scenarios for which you need to be notified. Keeping that in mind, Vtiger CRM sends you notifications for the actions mentioned below.

Activity alerts 

Activity alerts notify you of all the coming up, overdue, and completed events and tasks. They can be a call, a meeting, an onsite event, a pending task, etc.

You will also be notified when a record you follow is updated. If you have other users as your sub-ordinates, you will receive notifications when they submit approvals, complete a task, etc.

You can set activity alerts for other modules like leads, contacts, organizations, deals, etc.

You can set up alert notifications for the Assigned to field in your emails. So if a contact or an organization sends an email, the email recipient and the email record owner will receive a notification. 

This new configuration is available In Actions > Engagements Alerts > Email Alerts as Contact sent an email.
 

The record owner or a contact assigned will be notified via desktop notification whenever a contact sends a new email.
Note: If a CRM user disables the alert (engagement alerts are set at a user level), then the contact will not be notified about the email.

Engagement alerts 

Engagement alerts notify you based on your contacts’ actions on your emails. So you will receive tracking alerts when a contact,

• Opens an email that you sent
• Replies to an email that you sent
• Clicks a link in an email campaign that you sent
• Views a document that you shared
• Downloads a document that you shared
• Reshares a document with someone
• Comments on a document that you shared

Apart from the tracking alerts, you will also receive the following default alerts:

• When you receive an email from a contact
• When contact is awaiting response since one day
• When a contact has not replied to your email for more than a day
• When an email is not assigned to anyone
• When a new email assigned

You can also set the frequency of email alerts to notify you the first time or every time a contact opens an email, clicks a link in it, etc.

Mention alerts

You will be notified when other users directly mention you or your group on records. For example, when a user types ‘@’ and your name in the comments for your attention, you will be directly notified.

Idle alerts 

Idle alerts will notify you when a record is inactive and not updated for a specific time. For example, if a deal is in the ‘Ready to Close’ state for more than five days, you will be notified. This enables you to take the right action on it immediately.

Life cycle alerts

Life cycle alerts will notify you when a record has not progressed from one stage to the other. These alerts mainly depend on the status of a record. For example, if a quote has not progressed from the ‘Reviewed’ stage to the ‘Accepted’ stage, you will be notified to take the necessary steps.

To know more about setting up these notifications, click here.

Now that you are aware of the different notifications, you can also choose where you want to see them and set up different notification channels.

Alerts: Email Alert Channels for Contacts and Organizations

• Email Alert Channels send alerts to Contact owners about incoming emails.
• Engagement alerts for the Contact sent email option are now available for two alert channels - Desktop and Email. 
• If you enable the email channel alert, an alert email is sent to the ‘assigned to’ of the Contact. This is also available for Organizations.

Notification Channels

Setting up notifications is easy, but where you receive them matters. Vtiger provides these channels where you can receive notifications.

Desktop

When you choose desktop as your channel, all the notifications will pop up on your desktop. This will make sure that you don’t miss essential notifications while you are working on other tasks. Make sure that your local desktop notification settings for this setting to work.

Emails

When you choose emails as your channel, all the notifications will be sent to your Email ID mentioned in the account. 

Actions

This is your default channel. You will receive all the notifications in the Actions module in the CRM. This module has four tabs:

• My actions - You can see all activities like calls, events, tasks assigned to you in this tab. You will also receive life cycle alerts and idle alerts here.
• @Mentions - You will receive all mention alerts here.
• Updates - You will receive record activity, and team activity alerts here.
• Engagements - You will receive all engagement alerts here. They will be categorized into opens, replies, downloads, and reshares.

To know more about customizing your channel and preferences, click here.

Apart from configuring notifications, you can do the following:

• Mark a task as ‘completed’ or an event as ‘held’.
• Add a new notification rule for any module of your choice by specifying the conditions.
• Enable or disable notification sound. 
• Add a new action like send an email or SMS, create a task, schedule a meeting, etc.
• Send a broadcast to the whole organization.

Alert Rule

• Change in rule creation dates. When an alert rule is disabled and re-enabled, the system will not send notifications for old records which were created/modified when the rule was off.
• For example, let us say you enabled an alert for getting deals assigned to emails on 2nd FEB 2023, disabled it on 5th FEB 2023, and then re-enabled it on 15th FEB 2023. Then no alerts will be sent for records that were created/modified between 5th FEB and 15th FEB.