Automate proactive customer notifications
Authors:
Michael Wholohan, Holger Lierse
Changed on:
17 Nov 2025
Problem
Without automated order status notifications, customers remain uninformed about their order progress, leading to anxiety and proactive support inquiries.
Manual communication processes are inconsistent, resource-intensive, and don't scale, resulting in poor customer experiences and missed opportunities to set expectations. The lack of proactive updates increases WISMO contacts, damages customer confidence, and creates unnecessary operational overhead.
Example
A consumer electronics retailer sent only two emails per order: order confirmation and a generic shipment notification. Customers received no updates about picking progress, delays, or delivery exceptions until they proactively reached out. When a weather event delayed hundreds of shipments, the service team spent days reactively responding to individual inquiries instead of proactively notifying affected customers. The lack of automated status communications created anxiety for customers and positioned the brand as non-transparent compared to competitors who provided detailed tracking updates.
Solution Overview
Fluent Commerce Order Management leverages its event-driven architecture and native notification services to replace manual, reactive communication with a comprehensive, automated system of proactive customer updates throughout the entire order lifecycle.
Fluent OMS includes native support for generating and sending communications via email, SMS, and webhooks (to trigger existing marketing automation and notification tooling), ensuring a reliable and scalable mechanism for customer contact that eliminates reliance on external systems for basic notification.
Notifications are not limited to basic confirmation; they can be triggered at any stage of the Order Orchestration Workflow or based on any custom order lifecycle status (e.g. Pick Started, Delivery Exception, Shipment Confirmed, for example). This enables the retailer to proactively set expectations and manage customer expectations at critical junctures.
These Real-Time Contextual Updates leverage the latest order and tracking data to provide personalised and accurate updates, positioning the brand as transparent and reliable. By enabling communication on virtually any order event, Fluent transforms reactive crisis management into proactive communication.
By implementing Fluent OMS for automated proactive notifications, retailers achieves operational efficiency and superior customer satisfaction as follows:
- Massive WISMO Deflection: Customers are continuously informed by automated, timely messages, eliminating the anxiety that drives over an estimated approx. 60% of unnecessary service inquiries.
- Preserved Service Capacity: The service team is protected from being overwhelmed by reactive crisis calls (e.g. weather delays), allowing them to focus on true exceptions.
- Enhanced Brand Trust: The brand is positioned as transparent and reliable by providing detailed, proactive updates at every stage of the order lifecycle.
