About quick notifications and escalation rules

You can set up quick notifications and escalation rules to ensure that users never miss important information.

For example, a sales manager could use quick notifications and escalation rules configured for each sales representative based on their targets and dates. The manager could identify leads that must be followed up within one week to meet KPIs and generate automatic reminders for their sales reps to follow up with these leads.

A customer service manager might use onscreen notifications to share product information such as special offers and release dates, or to share critical real-time data so the team can be pro-active about resolving cases and identifying upsell opportunities.

Differences between quick notifications and escalation rules

You define quick notifications on the Notifications tab of a main entity. A quick notification can contain up to five conditions and is used outside the context of workflow. If some or all of the conditions are satisfied, a notification message is displayed onscreen or sent by email. Quick notifications are simple and quick to define and don't require knowledge of SQL. Instead, you define the WHERE clause using simple UI tools. When you save a quick notification, all necessary records are automatically created in the database workflow tables. Quick notifications are user based.

Escalation rules are usually more complex than quick notifications and can be used in a workflow or outside the context of workflow. In general, you use an escalation rule to create a notification that contains more than five conditions or contains a complex trigger SQL clause. If some or all of the conditions are satisfied or the clause is triggered, a notification message is displayed onscreen or sent by email, values are updated, or SQL is executed. If an escalation rule is included in a workflow, it's applied only to records in the correct state. Escalation rules are time based.

The conditions in quick notifications and escalation rules are expressed using SQL. They are governed by the same escalation mechanism and their behavior is logged in the escalation log and SQL log.

Setting up quick notifications

Task	Help
For quick notifications to work, you must enable Workflow & Escalation Configuration | Escalation. This setting also enables the Reminder field for new tasks and appointments.	Workflow and escalation settings
You can specify how many quick notifications are displayed on screen at once.	Workflow and escalation settings
Create a quick notification and specify what happens when the conditions of the rule are met.	Creating a quick notification

Setting up escalation rules

Task	Help
To use the Escalation service to run escalation rules, you must first turn the service on in Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Services and then enable the service in Workflow & Escalation Configuration | Use Escalation Service.	Workflow and escalation settings
For escalation rules to work, you must enable Escalation in Workflow & Escalation Configuration | Escalation.	Workflow and escalation settings
When escalation rules are activated, you must enable each rule individually.	Enabling an escalation rule
You can specify how often new escalations are triggered and how many notifications are displayed on screen at once.	Workflow and escalation settings
Predefined escalation rules display onscreen notifications to the system administrator but you can configure then to send the information to a different user.	Working with predefined escalation rules
You can define a new escalation rule outside the context of workflow.	Creating an escalation rule
You can create escalation rules and use the escalation table for custom entities. To do this, you must manage the data in the escalation table with table level scripts and build a custom view based on existing escalation rules. For example, you could use a PostInsertRecord() event function to insert a record into the escalation table.	Introduction to view customization Table and entity level scripts in the Developer Help