Notification for Stuck Lead in Campaign/Program Canvas

It would be great to have the ability to turn on notifications, especially when in Priority Mode (Program Builder), or Program Canvas.

We are currently putting the stuck contacts in hold steps with manual intervention. In addition, we are currently looking to use Insight to send an automated report for anything that has a custom field Status in a CDR = Failed.

@Arvin Figues @kasey.johnson

Hi I have the same situation with Form Submit Action App. What have you done with these stucked contacts?

Unfortunately, contacts stuck in Oracle's Form Submit Cloud App are not routed to the expected error step. There's only manual resolution...

@charlton This is a great idea that needs to be developed and released! Thanks for proposing!  However, I suggest taking it a step further and putting in the functionality to configure what to do with the stuck contacts, not just being notified of them.  Give users the ability to set actions for the stuck contacts, further automating the canvas/campaign. 

@Jennifer Gruninger, how are you putting stuck contacts in a hold step?  Are you doing this manually? Or have you figured out a way to do it automatically?

We are putting leads that fail the integration into a hold step in the program and then manually reviewing and modifying them to try again. Since we can't see the integration failure reason coming back from SFDC within the program, we don't have a way to automate how we repair the issues.

So there's multiple things to consider here. I'm still struggling with stuck contacts on app steps with "awaiting action" and "being processed by external service" - if stuck for more than ~6 hours they become indefinitely stuck and do not go into an error state where we can solution for that via error pathing, retry loops, etc. A big thing to consider is that sometimes there's a reason why contacts are stuck on steps and those reasons are performance, looping artificial delays, decision rules, app step delays, add to program builder throttling (adding more than ~100K pat a time corrupts the program), email sending is delayed, etc. For my specific example, this has been happening for 2+ years and it got better, but anytime something bad happens (a Yellow or Red status) I notice stuck contacts on app steps in both campaigns and program canvas. And no, after 10 SRs and 2.5 years, it's still not fixed.

I think this idea should identify more specific scenarios where contacts can get stuck for an undesirable amount of time. Things like being in a wait step past the configured time, "next evaluation" time is 10+ minutes in the past, etc.

As for the integration errors example by @Jennifer Gruninger, I think everyone struggles with this and becomes more difficult the higher the integration volume you have in your ELQ instance, however what I have found is that over the years as we have fixed all the bad/broken inputs (mostly forms) and forced them to better validate the data, coupled with better contact washing machines - this has all resulted in an integration failure rate so low that it's 1 failure per day and even those are mostly because of SFDC rejecting duplicates. For integration errors, I view failures by external call, drill down into things like "Create lead", "Update Lead" as well as our campaign-specific calls that we make due to our CDO-based integration. Instead of manually fixing all the errors I have instead opted to build more robust error control/retry mechanisms, daily segments that run all contacts with any possible error, daily cleansing/data washing on all contacts, etc. I have basically automated my way out of manual, mundane work that I used to have to spend 4 hours per day doing. Now I only look at one segment once per day, I get maybe 1-2 records I need to look at where before it was 50-200 per day. So, if SFDC rejects your call because of a {condition}, put into place a decision rule to look for said condition (e.g. mis-match of state/province and country - e.g. "Quebec" province where country is "United States", negative employee sizes or where it's 1 million or more, large text fields with more than 5,000 characters (yes, this is indeed very possible despite stated field character limits), etc.).

Also, there are now notifications that can be sent from wait steps to the Eloqua Operations Center. This still required that contacts not get stuck on a particular step, but you get the idea.

Looks like there has been no activity on this for 2 years, so I wanted to bring it up again. We are continuing to struggle with key program canvases occasionally having groups of contacts stuck on SalesForce Integration steps due to outages. There should be an Operations Center status section for programs/steps having stuck contacts based on a timeframe that makes sense to identify them as stuck. The option to get notifications as it changes would also be great. The current experience results in GDPR sensitive data or important campaign responses etc. not sending over as expected. Scouring our programs/steps for these issues on a daily basis makes no sense, it is both a time sink and a poor user experience. Furthermore, we can't trust the system when we're away.