Workflow rules play a crucial role in simplifying your business processes by automating various tasks. By defining specific conditions, you can determine whether a rule should be applied or not to the records in your system. This automation helps in reducing manual effort, improving efficiency, and ensuring consistent execution of your business rules.
When configuring workflows, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the criteria you want to set. It is quite likely that you already have a general idea of the number of records that may satisfy the specified conditions. However, to assess the performance of your workflow rules accurately, it is crucial to gain insights into the actual number of records that pass through each configuration level.
By analyzing the number of records at each stage, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your rule's execution criteria. This information empowers you to make informed decisions and fine-tune your workflows to achieve optimal results. The workflow usage report is designed to give you exactly that—record counts at each configuration stage in a workflow rule.
For example, you can view the number of records that qualify for a particular trigger, the total number of records that satisfy a given condition, record count for instant or scheduled actions. Further, for instant and scheduled actions, you can view additional details regarding the action, such as for emails, you can see the number of actions completed, incomplete, or the number in the queue.
Consider that you have configured a rule to 'send email' to all the prospects who have recently attended a conference. The rule is triggered and the emails are sent but you have no idea about the number of emails that were sent, whether any emails bounced, or how many of them are in the queue etc. With workflow reports you can see the exact number of emails that were sent, unsent, bounced, unopened, clicked, etc. For the emails that were bounced, you can also click on them to find which record it belongs to and retry sending to an alternate email address or rectify the existing one before sending.
Retry failed Actions
Workflow reports categorize the success and failure rates of the actions that are performed. While the success rate implies that the action is executed without any issues, the failure rate indicates the inability to execute the action. An action can fail due to reasons like incorrect email address, exceeding the email limit for the day, or any functionality glitch in the webhook or custom functions, etc. These failure insights are displayed along with the reason for failure and details of the associated record. With the failure list view, you can see which actions have failed and the reason for their failure. This helps to fix the error and then retry the actions for all records or an individual record.
Before proceeding with the retry action, you will be prompted to choose 2 determinants - Retry Action with and Perform workflow condition check before retrying.
- Retry Action with - to determine which data to consider before running retry action.
- Field Values from previous try - This option is helpful if you want to retry the failed actions with the old field values. For example, if the reason for failure is because of a connection issue or exhaustion of the email limit for the day, then a simple retry later with old data will be sufficient.
- Current field value - This option is helpful if you want to retry failed actions with the updated field values. For example, if the email address is incorrect, you can fix it and select the current field value option, to retry using the updated value.
- Perform workflow condition check before retrying - to choose if you want to run the workflow condition again before retrying the failed actions or not.
- Yes - Selecting Yes, you will allow the workflow rules to check the record(s) condition against the configured rule and retry if it is satisfied. This will validate the updated values if they are applicable to the rules.
- No - Selecting No, will allow you to directly proceed with the retry action without performing the workflow conditions.
Users with Manage automation permission or administrators will be able to retry these failed actions.
In scenarios where you do not want to retry the action(s) or curb other users with workflow permission from retrying the action, you can choose to exclude the action from retrying. When you choose to exclude, you will be prompted by a mandatory field to provide the reason for exclusion, thus helping other users to understand the reason for excluding an action from retry. For example, you can exclude the failed actions of an old campaign from retrying. If you want the excluded records to be included again, you can choose to include the actions again to retry. For example, if you have excluded a failed action by mistake, you can include it again to retry.
Notes :
- The retry action is available only for the following automated action:
- Email notifications
- Webhooks
- Custom Functions
The failed metrics for Email notifications will be shown in terms of the number of emails that Bounced. While for Webhooks and Custom Functions, it is displayed as Success and Failure rate.
- The number of retry counts will increase, every time the retry action fails.
- For action, a maximum of 5 retries can be done.
- If the retry action is successful the entry will be automatically removed from the list.
- Each failed action of a record is listed as a separate action item. Therefore, the failure statistics will provide the number of failures and the number of unique records distinctively. (Example: 3 failed email actions, 1 Unique Lead(s)). This allows you to select a specific action item to retry.
- For users who do not have permission to access a particular module the failed report will not show the record details for that user, rather it will be displayed as a View Record option in the record details.
- The retry option will be available only for the failed emails sent to external domains (that is lead or a customer). It will not be shown for failed emails that are sent to CRM users, roles, and groups.
In case there are records that are in the queue, you can click on the number in the workflow report to get the details of the in-queue actions in the form of a pop-up.
You can also find these actions in the
Upcoming Actions section of a record's timeline.
To view the workflow reports,
- Go to Set up > Automation > Workflow Rules.
- From the workflow rules list view, select the rule whose report and configuration you want to view. The report appears first.
To view the configuration of workflow rules, click the View Configurations button in the top-right corner of the page.
To retry the failed workflow actions
- Click on the failed record count.
- Hover on the record on the action you want to retry.
Understand and resolve the reason for failure - And, Click Retry.
- Alternatively, you can select multiple records and click Retry .
- Under Retry action with , do the following:
- Select Field values from previous try , if you want to retry with the existing data.
- Select Current Field Value , if you want to retry using the updated field value.
- Under Perform workflow condition check before retrying ,
- Select Yes , to run the workflow condition check to the record after the update.
- Select No , to proceed to retry the action.
- Click the Retry button, to schedule the retry action.
To exclude the record(s) for retry
- Select the failed action you want to exclude from retry.
- Click the Exclude the retry button .
- Provide the reason for exclusion and click Exclude from Retry .
To include the excluded failed action(s) to retry,
- Select the excluded failed action.
- Click the Include in retry button.
Points to remember
- You can view the past report of a rule by clicking the dropdown list in your workflow reports page. You can also use the filter to view rules for the past days (past 7 days, past 30 days) or define a custom date range for up to 7 days.
- The record count cannot be computed for the following triggers:
- Field update
- Based on score
- Date/Time field
- Cancellation of an event
- When you change from one condition to another like Create to Edit or Create to Delete and vice-versa, then the report will be reset and the data will be shown from the last modified date. The record count will be computed based on the new condition.
- If you deactivate a workflow rule the tracking will be paused and resumed from the same count, once the rule is re-activated.
- If you have set a workflow rule for incoming emails that are received from unknown users and set either functions or webhook as actions, then these action will be performed on the email as the user's record is not yet added to the CRM.
- In the above case, if you set the action to record creation, then the subsequent actions will be performed on the record.
- If a condition is edited then the record count will be reset for the entire report.
- For actions the record count will be computed from the time when the action is associated to a workflow.
- Tagging of records will be performed as per the feature's limitation in CRM (10 tags/record). Therefore, once the record reaches a maximum limit for tagging, the remaining tags will be shown under the failure count. For example, if a record already has 5 tags and through workflow rule it should add 7 more tags, then based on the limitation only 5 more tags will be added and the remaining 2 tags will be listed under the failure count.
- You can view the failure count for email notifications, functions, and webhooks. The following reasons for an email failure will be captured: email opt-out, internal process failure, and per day limit for sending email reached and bounced.
To view workflow usage
- In Workflow Rules , either create a new rule or select an existing rule.
- In the Rule criteria page, click View Usage at the right-hand side bottom of the page.
- In the report, you can view the workflow usage for the configured execution type, conditions, and actions.
You can click the Close icon ( ) to exit the usage report page and view the respective workflow rule.