Push vs. Subscription Notification Types

Notification types are defined as either push – which means that a customer need not sign up to receive notifications of this type, or subscription – which means that a customer must sign up to receive this type of notification. As you can tell, they have different uses and different behaviors.

Push notification types allow users to specify communication preferences for a general type of notification, which are referred to as parent push notification types. These preferences include contact preferences and opt-out preferences, which are applied to individual notifications belonging to the parenrt type. For example, “Products and Offers” may be the parent type, and the individual notification types may include several different types of product and offers notifications that contain different messages and are targeted at different customers. Refer to Parent vs. Individual Push Notification Types for more information.

In the absence of any contact preference or opt-out preference, push-based notifications can determine a default contact and send the notification using it. The logic to determine a default contact is defined via an algorithm plugged into the Determine Default Contact plug-in spot on the Notification Type (BO). The base product provides the C1-NTF-DFPRF (Determine Default Contact for Notification Type) algorithm, which looks to retrieve a default contact from the account’s main person.

Subscription notification types define a particular notification and its message. Customers must have an active contact preference to receive these notifications. Subscription-based notification types can use an underlying service task. Refer to Some Notification Types Use Service Task for more information. A subscription-based notification type can also be set up to allow routing of bills or quotes to multiple destinations.

Note: For template-based notifications, there are distinct business objects for subscription, parent push and individual push notification types. For message-based notifications, there is a single business objects and the behavior of the notification type must be defined when configuring the notification type.