More visibility into Advanced outreach sending status

HI Alex,

Thanks for sharing your use case. We will add it to the roadmap and prioritise based on customer asks in the thread here.

Secondly, we have the ability to schedule sources and decide when to send the Advanced outreach emails and this includes the first email as well.Once you add the sources and set schedule for the sources and publish the AO, then the participants will be added based on source schedule configured. Once the participants are added , the first step will be executed ( be it email or create cta etc.). Please check our documentation for adding schedule to powerlist and bionic sources.

Thanks
Abhishek S

I'd like to second this.  We've been getting numerous reports from customers where they publish an AO and it does not send for 1-2 hours.

Their understandable expectation is that it starts sending as soon as they hit "Publish", and if it doesn't they are concerned that there is something wrong.

If there is an expected delay, it might be helpful to note this somewhere publicly, as customers are typically not aware of this until it hits support's radar.

Proactivity is the name of the game :) 

I third this.  I'm seeing delays in AOs sending emails when the participants are added via an event, and the expectation we were given was that because events add participants immediately the AO would send off emails immediately. Because this isn't always the case, this is causing major issues in a workflow that was based on the premise of event > AO.

Hi Sarah,

The use case for events is not that it will be real time or immediate but it removes the need for schedule based AOs which is almost always late when compared to event based processing which immediately adds it to the queue for processing.

But , just to understand better, on an average how much delay are you seeing when processing events in AO? 

Thanks
Abhishek S

I agree with everything that Alex said above. Fourth this! Today, I waited around an hour for the emails to send after I published an Advanced Outreach. I put in a support ticket because I was unaware if the outreach would actually send.

Hi All,

Completely understand the pain points shared here. We will try to address both the points raised - 

a. Reduce the delays between publish and email actually being sent as much as possible. There are some technical challenges which are being worked on to make this as close as possible or to an acceptable delay.

b. Second one is about making sure , we notify the scenario that there are some participants who are in queued state. We have the snapshot view which shows the participants who are in each step. We will think of enhancing this view to showcase the participants who are in queue between different steps.

Hope to add more details regarding these points in the short term roadmap.

Thanks
Abhishek S

Affirming my interest here also.

There are some heart-pounding moments where an Advanced Outreach is in flight, participants have been added, and uncertainty reigns on if you're simply playing the waiting game for the emails to depart, or if you have an actual problem to research. Having to "wait and see" can slow down the game, especially if your workflow is critical with respect to timing.

I can understand that Advanced Outreach is not necessarily designed for immediacy. However, adding clarity around this would indeed be helpful.

Yes I agree - not knowing if you need to troubleshoot or just wait for the spool can be stressful.

In
my email server admin days we had spool monitoring and dashboards to show the various stages of messages in the queue.  We could see when emails were delayed and usually could infer the why from the where. Generally anything more than 15 minute
delay would start generating a wave of calls so we kept a pretty tight watch on
those.

Having the ability to add a spool monitoring dashboard element to an admin's operational dashboard would be most helpful.

That is exactly my issue! I truly have not found a rhyme or reason. Sometimes it is a minute delay, sometimes 2 hours.

Thank you!

Hi Everyone,

In order to address the issue with respect to the participants who are in queued state , we plan to add the following in the program snapshot view. As you can see , the icon on the edge between participants and the send email action indicates that some participants are in queued state. You can click on the icon to see the list of participants.

Let us know if this would help you in understanding the participants who are stuck between steps because of queue delays. Just to be clear , this is in addition to reduction in email delays which we are already working on.

Thanks,
Abhishek S

+1 🙂 Love it all!

Matthew - You have a way with words.  That's exactly how I feel every time I get it email blast ready to send...then hit send.  But happy to see Abhishek response regarding everyone's feedback!