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dale_parent
dale_parent
Helper ⭐️
September 21, 2018
Solved

Unique Criteria and Failed Participants in Programs

  • September 21, 2018
  • 4 replies
  • 401 views
I'm running a basic email chain program to provide monthly notifications to a subset of our clients, approx 100.  Our goal is to send only one email to a single contact for each client so we're using an account number field as unique criteria.  About 40% fail out for various reasons so in those cases no notification will be sent without some time consuming intervention.  Ideally I would like the program to keep iterating through contacts on each account until it finds one that won't fail out.  I haven't come up with a graceful way to accomplish this yet.  Has anyone else encountered this challenge?  Appreciate your suggestions, thanks!
    Best answer by john_apple
    So - the goal is to send to one contact on the account but it doesn't matter which contact? 
    What is the reason for failure - incorrect or out-of-date information, bounce-list, blacklist? Is there a way to exclude these.
    How do you have Entry Criteria set? Are participates allowed to re-enter? And is there a Sync schedule for participants?
    I'm not sure if this is possible and I don't have a use-case myself, but would be interested to see the expected behavior if you set participants to re-enter after drop and then sync daily or something if that would pull a fresh list or just the same contacts again and again. 

    4 replies

    john_apple
    john_appleAnswer
    Expert ⭐️
    September 21, 2018
    So - the goal is to send to one contact on the account but it doesn't matter which contact? 
    What is the reason for failure - incorrect or out-of-date information, bounce-list, blacklist? Is there a way to exclude these.
    How do you have Entry Criteria set? Are participates allowed to re-enter? And is there a Sync schedule for participants?
    I'm not sure if this is possible and I don't have a use-case myself, but would be interested to see the expected behavior if you set participants to re-enter after drop and then sync daily or something if that would pull a fresh list or just the same contacts again and again. 
    dan_ahrens
    dan_ahrens
    Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    September 21, 2018
    Hi Dale, depending on the importance of the notification, I'd guess this might be a use case where you'd want the customer to designate a specific contact to receive this notification so that it went to the person in their company best suited to take any necessary action. They may even want to assign this to a distribution list email address so that it goes to multiple people. 

    If that's the case, it might make sense to create a field on the Account object to store the 'designated email contact' and then use that in your program. Would this work?
    VP of Customer Success at Forcepoint
    dale_parent
    dale_parentAuthor
    Helper ⭐️
    September 24, 2018
    Great questions and suggestions.  I'll go through in order

    John,
    It will matter which contact but at the moment it only matters that we deliver the data to one contact per account.  This is a new process and we are making adjustments each month based on customer feedback.
    The majority of failure reasons are bounce-list and missing token.  This gave me ideas.
    At the moment we do not have participants re-entering or a sync schedule because we are still fine-tuning the program each month.
    I did some testing on participants re-entering and it appears that as long as the query and contact data remains unchanged, the same participant is selected each time.

    Ideas: Assuming this can be done, I'm going to try to merge contacts with the bounce list in the query builder next time around.  That should prevent pulling contacts who would fail for that reason after passing the uniqueness criteria.  MIght be nice to have a built-in bounce-list pre-filter feature in programs.  I will also be looking at removing old entries from the bounce-list to keep it fresh.

    Dan,
    Fantastic suggestion and yes our ultimate goal is to identify the right person or persons to receive the report.  The target account list changes each month and we have several contact fields we can leverage for identifying who gets it and adjust based on customer feedback.

    Ideas: Add a Gainsight Communication Type multi-picklist on the contact object for this and other initiatives.
    Bonus idea - add a Gainsight Opt-in checkbox for general cases.

    Thanks for the great feedback

    john_apple
    john_apple
    Expert ⭐️
    September 24, 2018
    For missing token - can you adjust the outreach/program to allow the email to go through even if tokenized field is null. We do this occasionally when we need to send an important operational email since the message is more important than making sure we have their first name for example. I think the box is checked by default on outreaches so you have to uncheck. 
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