Workflows - delays based on "email sent" not consistent

[siddheshr]

Hi guys,

Some context:

Our company has a "Contact Us" HubSpot form. Whenever someone fills this out, our sales rep emails them to start a conversation.

I've set up a workflow in our org that also gets triggered whenever someone fills the form. What the workflow does is, if the contact doesn't reply to our sales rep for 7+ days in the conversation, it sends a reminder email to ask if they're still interested. It also sends an internal reminder to our sales rep if they don't reply back in 3+ days. This way we don't have contacts slipping through the cracks.

Now, the actual problem:

To wait the 3 days for the sales rep to respond, we have a delay step set up in the workflow with a "Has Completed: Email Sent" event like so:

The workflow branches into two after this step:

So, if the contact's enrollment entered this step on 1st Jan 1pm, it would wait till 4th Jan 1pm for our sales rep to respond. If they did, left branch, if not, right branch.

The problem is that this only works partially. There have been instances where our sales rep DOES respond within 3 days after the enrollment reaches this step, but the execution still waits the entire 3 days and goes to the right branch.

I've made this long enough so will stop here. I'm just looking for *any* possible explanation as to why this could be happening. If it didn't work at all that would be debuggable, but the fact that it *sometimes* works is what makes this hard to figure out. Happy to provide more details!

[kennedyp]

Hey @siddheshr! Great explanation of your setup. Looking at your delay criteria, it seems to be delayed based on the user sending an email to the contact. What may be happening is the user sends the email before the contact reaches the delay. In this type of delay, if an event has already happened when a record enters the delay, it will not immediately exit the delay. Records will only exit the delay if the event occurs while the record is in the delay.  

All of that said, I don't think that is what your delay is intended to be based on. Instead, you want them to sit in the delay until they reply Or for 3 days. I'd recommend changing the delay criteria to "replied to email": 

Let me know if I did not understand your questions or if you need additional clarification!

Best, 
Kennedy

[siddheshr · Accepted solution]

Hi @kennedyp ,

Thanks for your response. Yes you're right about an email getting sent *before* the dealy starts, which is why the workflow waited 3 days. That said this happened in some but not all cases.

For the rest, to clarify some terms:

- let's call the customer/user who filled out the form the "contact"

- let's call our sales rep emailing them afterward as the "rep"

So it's the contact that enrolls in the workflow. For this specific delay, we want to wait 3 days for the rep to email the contact, and not the contact to email the rep. We have a different delay for the latter case which works perfectly.

So I do think "email sent" was the right filter (I'd tested it separately), because it implied an "email sent *to*" the contact, which is what we wanted to watch out for. The event you've mentioned, "replied to email", I'm assuming checks for when the contact replies, though I could be wrong.

I did tinker around with this the other day and found an alternate solution: to check if the "Last Contacted" date property value on Contacts changes. If it does, it means the contact was emailed/met with in the 3 days, which seems to solve my problem for now:

Thanks for looking into this!

[kennedyp]

Thanks for clarifying @siddheshr! I did misunderstand, but your workaround looks good 😊 Thank you so much for sharing!

As always, if any questions come up, feel free to reply to this post or create a new one. 

Best, 
Kennedy