LoanPro allows you to set up email, Interactive SMS, system, and Smart Mail House notifications to be sent out when specific criteria is met or an event occurs on a customer's account. These are called event-based or trigger-based system notifications. The notification engine is a centralized location for viewing these notifications and others within your company account.

Notification center

The notification engine is located in Tools > Notification Center. In the notification engine, you’ll see an events and triggers section and a system section. 

The events and triggers section lets you view all of the notifications that occur based on actions taken for events and triggers set up in your company account. To see how to subscribe your user for event or trigger notifications, see the “Configure Agent Users” section of the Agent Users article. You also have options to help you search for or filter notifications including keywords, date ranges, and read status. On the left, you can choose to view only the notifications from a specific event or trigger.

The system section works just like the events and triggers section except the notifications are generated by the system based on events and triggers that LoanPro tracks natively.

Event-based notifications

Event-based notifications are sent out when a specified event happens, like a transaction, a change in loan status or portfolio, or activity on the customer portal. There are a variety of events that are native to LoanPro, but you also have the ability to create your own events. You can view the events listed in your company account by going to Settings > Notification Engine > Event Based Notifications.

Create an event-based notification

To create an event-based notification, navigate to Settings > Company > Automated Notifications > Event Based Triggers. On this page, you'll see a long list of available events. To add a notification for any of these, click the pencil icon to the right.

Custom events

You can also create your own event based on a status or portfolio change. To create a new notification, click 'Add' in the top right corner. You'll first enter all the information about the custom event, and later add the linked notifications that get sent out when the event happens on an account. Here's a breakdown of each field. 

Linked notification

After the event information, you'll see a list of linked notifications and a ‘Add’ button that lets you create more. On the left of each notification is a toggle button that lets you enable or disable it. On the right, there are buttons to edit the notification or delete it altogether.
When you add or edit a notification, it'll pull up a window asking for ‘Type’. Changing this field will bring up different fields depending on the type of message you're configuring.

Trigger-based notifications

Trigger-based notifications are based on the Clojure rules that you can create within the system. Users create a rule that looks for something specific, such as when when a loan payment becomes a day late. Each day during daily maintenance, the system will evaluate the rule against each account, and if the rule is true, the notification is sent. 

If you are unfamiliar with writing Clojure rules, visit our Clojure article. You can view the triggers listed in your company account by going to Settings > Company > Automated Notifications > Dynamic Triggers.

Create a trigger-based notification

To begin, navigate to Settings > Company > Automated Notifications > Dynamic Triggers. To create the notification, click 'Add' in the top right corner. Provide a name and description for the new notification.

Next, you can create a trigger that will cause the notification to be sent. Click 'Empty' to create a new rule. Clicking this text will display the ‘Formula Editor’ window where you can add a new or existing rule. The ‘Formula Editor’ features a text box where you can write your own Clojure rules. If you are writing a new rule, use the bottom half of the window to search for context variables to use in your rules. You can also add a rule you've already created by clicking 'Load Existing Rule'.

After you have written a Clojure statement, click 'Validate this rule' to make sure your syntax is correct. You won't be able to create an automated notification with an invalid rule. Note that while the system checks for invalid syntax, it can't check for accurate logic. In other words, you can easily create a correctly written rule that doesn't do what you want it to do. Thus, make sure to validate your rules as well as read through them yourself to make sure they are accurate. Click 'Save' to finalize the rule the system will check for.

Notification methods

Once rule criteria is met or an event has been set, you will need to determine what kind of notification to send out.

System

System notifications are sent inside the software to your agent users. These notifications cannot be sent to customers. You must enroll your agent users for them to receive notifications. Visit our Enrollment and History article to learn how.  

After enrolling agent users, the following configuration options are available you you In either the event-based or trigger-based notification page:

• Notification Status – Determines whether this notification should be active or not. If this action is set to 'Off', the notification will not be sent out.
• Display As Pop-up – Determines whether to have a popup show on the display whenever the notification is triggered.

If you choose to create a trigger-based system notification, you have one additional option:

• Evaluate In Real Time – Setting this to 'On' will cause the system to evaluate the rule every time an event (such as a new payment) that causes the numbers on the loan to be recalculated occurs on a customer account. Otherwise, the rule will be evaluated only when customer accounts are updated daily by the system.

The bottom section of the page is where you can create the message that will appear in the notification engine and the popup notification. You can use LoanPro’s variables in both the message and the popup message. Variables merge customer and account information into the message to make it more informative. To use variables, click the 'Help Variables' button. 

Email

Email notifications can be sent to either the customer, agent user, or both. These notifications are designed to keep you in contact with your customers and ensure that your agent users are updated on their customer's account activity. For agent users to receive notifications, they must be enrolled. For more information on enrollment, visit our Enrollment and History article. 

You can choose the basic information for the email in the top section of both event and trigger based notifications. The options are:

• Email Status – Choose whether this email should be active or not. If this action is set to Off, the email will not be sent out.
• Email Subject – The subject of the email.
• Deliver To – Who should receive this email. You can choose to have customers, agent users, or both, as well as the source company's primary contact.
• From Address – This drop-down contains the list of verified email addresses for your company. It will be defaulted to "Company Primary Email", which means that these notifications can start to work as soon as a primary email address is verified for your company. Choose the email address that this email should be coming from.
• From Title – This is the display name that will be shown to the customer when they receive the email.

The bottom section is where you will enter the body of the email that will be sent. LoanPro's variables are also available so that the information in the email will be specific to the recipient.

SMS

SMS text messages can only be sent to your customers within your LoanPro customer accounts – you can't send SMS text messages to agent users. 
Before you begin sending SMS notifications, we recommend reading our Interactive SMS article to learn how to set it up in your company account and understand how it works. With SMS notifications, you will need to select a template notification message, which can be found in the previously linked article. 

Smart Mail House

Smart Mail House will send physical mail to customers. Through Connections, you can create mail inside of LoanPro and we'll send it to one of our integrated services that will print the mail, place it in an envelope, and mail it to the customer. Similar to SMS notifications, you will need to select a template that you can create. Our Smart Mail House article goes over how to set up Smart Mail House and  create these templates inside of LoanPro. 

In both notification pages, click the “Templates” button or drop-down menu to select which template you want to use. Once you choose a template, you will see a preview of the message. Once you've set up your mail house notification, you can track the status of mail that's been sent out by navigating to Tools > Customer Communication > Smart Mail House.

Webhooks

Along with the SMS, email, system and mail house notifications, there is also an option to use a webhook. A webhook is used to connect two programs to create an alert when an event occurs. Webhooks involve some technical knowledge to set up. You can read more about webhooks and how they work for event-based and trigger-based notifications in our Base Communications Suite article.