Troubleshooting Cadence Actions Errors

Occasionally, when a Cadence Member and its associated Touchpoint become out of sync, Cadence Actions appears to be blank as though there is no Open Touchpoint for the parent record, but the ‘This Record has no active Cadences’ text does not appear.

Note: This is only one scenario, the most common, of troubleshooting that this article covers and is used for example. The article may still be relevant to you if you are experiencing other issues with the Cadence Actions panel.

This can cause confusion, as well as unintended side effects, like seemingly duplicate Touchpoints, or the inability to enroll the parent record into a new Cadence.

Left: Cadence Actions in a proper state, with no records enrolled. Right: Cadence Actions in a bugged state.

We appreciate your patience as Conquer developers address the root cause of this issue. In the meantime, this article will break down the cause, diagnosis, the solution, and some methods of prevention.

The Cause

As mentioned above, this occurs when the Cadence Member and Touchpoint are out of sync: specifically if the record has an Active Cadence Member whose associated ‘Next Touchpoint’ is in a status other than ‘Open’.

Most commonly, this can happen in one of two ways:

1. A user has navigated directly to the Touchpoint and changed its Status to ‘Completed’. The Touchpoint is now completed, but the Cadence Member is still active.
2. A process, job, or flow rule in the org’s background has conflicted with Conquer automation, for example, preventing the system from updating an inactive Cadence member to a status of ‘Removed’ or ‘Completed’’.

There are many different ways this can occur given the complex interaction between Cadence Members and Touchpoints, but the root issue will always boil down to the bold text above.

Locate Affected Members

You can verify this issue by creating a List View on the Cadence Member object, and use filters to narrow Cadence Members down to those that point at the particular record(s) in question. Ensure that the ‘Active’ field is shown under Fields To Display.

Navigate to the Cadence Member which shows as Active, and then scroll to the field called ‘Next Touchpoint’. Click the link, and confirm that the Touchpoint’s status is either ‘Skipped’ or ‘Complete’. Either status will result in this error.

The Fix

Solving this issue is simple. 

• If you want to remove the record from the Cadence:
  
• Navigate back to the Cadence Member whose status is Active and mark it Inactive. The system will automatically update the Cadence Member’s status to ‘Completed’.
• If you want the record to continue on the Cadence sequence:
• Change the Touchpoint’s status to ‘Open’. The record will be placed back in the sequence on the last Touchpoint they left off.

It’s possible you are experiencing an issue other than this in Cadence Actions, such as seemingly two Touchpoints appearing when a record is newly enrolled into a Cadence. 

This issue is also caused by Cadence Members and Touchpoints being out of sync, so please apply the same principles in this article when troubleshooting. The main principle is this:

• If a Cadence Member is Active, its associated ‘Next Touchpoint’ should be in a status of ‘Open’.
  

Anything else will result in errors as discussed above. 

Prevention

While Conquer works on a solution for this error, we can offer some tips for preventing it occurring in the first place.

Train reps to never change the status of a Touchpoint on the Touchpoint record itself, but rather do so through the actions menu on the Conquer Cadence UI. You may also elect to make the field ‘Read Only’ on the Cadence Member Page Layout assigned to your Conquer Users, which will further prevent users from manually changing the Touchpoint’s status.

Create a Custom Object Tab for the Conquer Error object. Parse through these records to see if there are errors which indicate a common cause for Cadence Members failing to be marked as Inactive, such as a competing Workflow Rule or other automation. This information might also be found in Setup > Apex Jobs in Salesforce.