A customer emails asking if you can hold a large order for a month while they’re travelling. You reply, confirm, add an interaction on their profile: “Hold order 4137 until July 12 per their email; family trip; unusual circumstance.” Three weeks later your packer opens the order, sees the interaction on the customer’s profile, knows not to ship yet.
The conversation didn’t live in your inbox. It lived where the next staff member looks.
What gets logged
Nine interaction types, each with its own icon in the timeline:
- Note: a general observation or reminder worth keeping on the record.
- Phone Call: a phone conversation you or staff had with the customer.
- Email: a message relevant to the customer’s account, logged so it isn’t only in someone’s inbox.
- Complaint: a recorded complaint for later reference (useful when a recurring issue needs tracking).
- Compliment: positive feedback worth capturing alongside the complaints.
- Refund Request: a customer-initiated refund conversation, logged outside the formal returns flow.
- Return: a return conversation logged against the customer, complementing the returns workflow.
- Preference Update: something the customer has asked for specifically (“prefers card over bubble wrap”; “gift wrap Christmas orders”).
- Other: anything that doesn’t fit the above.
Each entry carries the text, the type (with icon), the staff member who logged it, and the timestamp. Anything you want a future staff member to know about this customer goes here.
Where it lives
The timeline renders as a card on the customer’s profile, between the order history and the linked accounts section. Newest entries at the top; scrollable for long histories. Staff opening the profile see the conversation context alongside the orders and status.
For interactions that need staff attention (“remember to follow up”), entries can be marked as needing acknowledgement. The card surfaces the unacknowledged ones up the top so they don’t get buried under everything else.
Who can add interactions
Admins and shop managers can add and acknowledge entries by default. You can grant the same to custom staff roles, or keep specific roles read-only.
Turn types on or off
Interactions are on by default. In the settings panel you can toggle each interaction type individually, in case you want a tighter scope of what your team records.
Why shops keep it open
The best shops treat every customer like a relationship, not a transaction. The interactions timeline is how that intent survives staff turnover, holidays, busy weeks. Someone told a customer they’d hear back by Friday; the note is on their profile; the next staff member to open it knows; the follow-up happens. Nothing falls to memory; nothing slips to “I thought you were handling that.”
If you’re weighing this up against a CRM or help-desk tool
Help-desk tools (Gorgias, Zendesk, Help Scout) are built for customer conversation at scale. Every email becomes a ticket, agents work from a queue, response times and satisfaction scores are first-class metrics. For high-volume support operations, they’re the right shape.
CRMs (FluentCRM, Jetpack CRM) treat customer conversations as one kind of activity alongside campaigns, deals, and pipelines. Interactions live inside the CRM’s UI as one part of a broader contact record.
HQ’s interactions timeline is the lighter version of the idea: it’s not a ticketing system and it’s not a CRM. It’s a shared staff notebook tied to each customer, inside the WooCommerce admin you already work in, surfaced on the same profile your team already opens. If you’re already running a help desk or CRM, the timeline complements them by being the lightweight log that lives where your WooCommerce team works.