Your engineering team is in the middle of a critical sprint when a Slack message arrives from customer support:
"Urgent escalation - customer says they never received the order confirmation email."
What follows is familiar: a developer gets pulled away from their work to dig through logs and verify notification workflows. The resolution? The customer had turned off their email preferences.
When engineering teams create notification infrastructure that only satisfies their requirements, support agents must then rely on engineers to investigate even the most straightforward notification issues. The result is interrupted development work, slower customer service, and frustrated end users.
In this post, we'll explore how giving your support team access to notification logs can reduce engineering interruptions and deliver faster customer service. Let's look at how visual debugging tools empower support teams to solve notification issues independently.
5 ways notification logs can help customer service teams
Below we’ll use a two-sided marketplace as an example. This type of product triggers several different notifications, and buyers and sellers both expect fast resolution of issues.
1. Verifying buyer-seller communication
A buyer reports they haven't received a response from a seller about an item they have purchased but are unhappy with.
With notification access, your support team can check the logs and see that while the inquiry email was delivered, the seller hasn't opened it yet. They inform the buyer and send a follow-up to the seller.
2. Troubleshooting order delays
A buyer complains about a delayed shipment. The support team checks the logs and discovers the buyer never opened a critical email requiring order confirmation. With this insight, they can resend the notification and guide the buyer through completing their order.
3. Fixing delivery channel issues
When a buyer asks about missing shipping updates, support can find that while emails are being delivered, SMS notifications are failing due to an outdated phone number. They can immediately help the buyer update their contact information and explain which notifications they missed.
4. Managing notification preferences
A buyer contacts support about missing a back-in-stock alert for a desired item. The logs show the buyer had accidentally disabled notifications for inventory alerts. Support can walk them through updating their preferences, without involving any engineers.
5. Detecting fraud
A buyer reports suspiciously aggressive bidding on an auction item. Support checks the notification logs and discovers that the user profiles for both the seller and some of the bidders were created at the same time, open notifications at the same time, and have other similarities.
This reveals that the seller is likely using separate buyer accounts to inflate prices. Support can take immediate action to protect legitimate buyers, all without needing engineering help to investigate the connection between accounts.
Knock’s visual debugging tools
Knock's notification logs provide support teams with the same visibility engineers have into the notification pipeline. From a single interface, support staff can:
- Track the complete lifecycle of any notification, from trigger to delivery.
- View detailed event payloads to understand what triggered each notification.
- Follow workflow steps to see how a notification was processed.
- Check delivery status across all channels (email, SMS, in-app, ect.).
- See user engagement like opens and link clicks.
- Preview the actual messages sent to the user.
Learn more about Knock’s observability features.
These tools are designed to be used without any technical knowledge. Engineering teams can assign support staff read-only, limited view access to notification logs. And support teams can quickly search, filter, and understand notification logs without needing to write queries or decode technical jargon.
“Easily access the entire history of a notification”
Discogs, the world's largest online marketplace for music collectors, uses Knock to power notifications across their global platform. Their experience highlights the impact of choosing accessible notification infrastructure on customer service:
“The level of visibility Knock provides into our notification system was a game-changer. Our customer service team can now easily access the entire history of a notification, from the initial template to the final delivered message."
Read the full Discogs case study.
Bridge the gap between support and engineering
Notification logs are more than just a debugging tool—they're a bridge between your support and engineering teams. By giving support teams direct access to notification data, you eliminate unnecessary engineering escalations, speed up customer resolution times, and let developers stay focused on building your product.
Book a call with us to discuss how Knock can serve your engineering and customer service teams.