Troubleshooting failed actions in a journey

Overview

Occasionally, actions within a customer journey may not perform as expected, which can affect how the journey progresses. These issues can stem from a variety of factors and may require further investigation to resolve. This article provides an overview of potential causes for failed actions and offers general guidance on how to address them, helping to ensure journeys continue to run smoothly.

Failed action

If contacts fail to process an action in a journey, they will appear in the Failed metric for that shape.

Example action showing failed for two people.

To find the reason why it failed, go to Activity > locate the failed action > click Show details.

EX: Organization not found: This means the contact is not linked to any organization.

Learn more about failed Salesforce actions.

Action failed: Duplicate

The Duplicate error means the action is set to run only once, and it has already been performed for this contact. This can happen if a contact enters the same journey more than once.

To fix this, change the action's setting from Only once to More than once so the action can be triggered each time the contact passes through.

You may also want to consider the If this action fails setting, to decide whether the person will continue in the journey or will exit the journey.

Learn more about modifying action settings.

How failed journey actions are retried

Sometimes, action shapes in a journey may fail for various reasons. Instead of marking them as failed right away, they are automatically retried up to 12 times. Learn more about how failed journey actions are retried.