Skip to main content

Troubleshooting trial tasks

When the sales team reports missing trial tasks, first work out which part of the chain stopped. The trial might not have reached Freshsales, the contact might not have entered a journey, or the journey might be running and the task simply isn't due yet. The checks on this page go in that order. For how the chain works, see Sales automation.

Check that a new trial entered a journey​

Tasks can come days after sign-up, so a missing task doesn't prove anything on the day of the sign-up. The reliable same-day check is the contact's activity timeline:

  1. Find a trial contact created in the last day or two. The Freshsales contact view Most recent trials lists them newest first.
  2. Open the contact and look at its activity timeline. A working trial shows Entered journey a few seconds after the contact was created, followed by the first journey email.
  3. If the contact shows only its creation and subscription, it never entered a journey. Check the segment next.

You can also check with the Freshsales API. The API key and host are FRESHSALES_API_KEY and FRESHSALES_BUNDLE_ALIAS in the .env file of the dashboard repository. All the calls on this page only read data:

curl -s -H "Authorization: Token token=$FRESHSALES_API_KEY" "https://$FRESHSALES_BUNDLE_ALIAS/api/contacts/<contact id>/activities"

A working contact has an FM_ENTERED_JOURNEY activity, with the journey_name, and then FM_SENT_JOURNEY_EMAIL or FM_DELIVERED_JOURNEY_EMAIL. To see a contact's tasks, with their owner and creation date, add ?include=tasks to the contact:

curl -s -H "Authorization: Token token=$FRESHSALES_API_KEY" "https://$FRESHSALES_BUNDLE_ALIAS/api/contacts/<contact id>?include=tasks"

Check the segment​

Open the segment from Marketing Automation > Segments. The number of contacts that match is at the top of the page. If it's 0, nothing can enter the journey, whatever the conditions look like.

If the count is wrong, compare the segment conditions with the Trial Type and Trial Online Product values on a recent trial contact. The values must match exactly. The expected rules are in Trial follow-up tasks, and the values each sign-up path writes are in Trial sources.

Check the journey​

Open the journey from Marketing Automation > Customer Journeys and check these things:

  • The status next to the journey name is Active. A stopped journey creates nothing.
  • The Track tab shows how many contacts entered, are in progress, and completed at each node. If the entry count hasn't moved for days while trials are coming in, contacts aren't entering.
  • Every Add Task node is assigned to an active user. A task assigned to a deactivated user doesn't show on anyone's dashboard. You can list the users and whether they're active with GET /api/selector/owners.

On the Build tab, the palette on the left also contains the words "Added to segment". A page search finds the palette, not the trigger. Use the full-screen button and scroll the canvas to the left to find the real trigger and its segment name.

Traps​

These have each cost time before:

  • Tasks come days after sign-up. Apart from the day-0 task, journey tasks are created on day 4 and on day 18 or 19. After an outage is fixed, the day-18 tasks don't come back for another 18 days, even though the journeys are working.
  • The Activities Dashboard shows only your own tasks. Journey tasks belong to Roosh Dollie. If you sign in as someone else, the dashboard is empty. See Trial follow-up tasks.
  • GET /api/tasks returns only the API key owner's tasks. It is empty for the sales team's tasks. Check tasks on the contact instead.
  • Editing a segment doesn't start the journey for contacts who already match. When you save a segment, every matching contact joins the segment, but the journey's Added to segment trigger doesn't fire for them. Only a contact's own creation or update starts the journey. A segment fix never catches up the contacts that were missed, so give the sales team a list of them instead.
  • A contact goes through each journey once. Re-entry is turned off, so a contact who finished a journey in the past doesn't enter it again when they start a new trial.

The 2026 outage​

From August 12 to September 18, 2026, no trial contact entered any journey, and the sales team got no trial tasks. The contacts kept arriving in Freshsales, so the problem wasn't noticed for about a month.

The segments were filtering Trial Online Product on the old regional values, such as Canada - Canada Nutrient guidelines. On August 11 and 12, the app started writing module names such as Food Label instead, so no new contact matched. The first attempt to fix it, on September 15, added a new condition group beside the old ones while the top-level toggle was All of the groups. That meant a contact had to match the old rule and the new rule together, so all three segments still matched 0 contacts. On September 18, each segment was cut down to one group, and new trials started entering the journeys within seconds.

About 145 trial contacts from August 12 to September 18 never entered a journey, and they won't get any journey tasks. The sales team was given a list to follow up by hand. The Make Final Phone call for lead tasks for trials after the fix start around October 6, 2026. The day-0 New trial sign-up task was added in September 2026, so that the sales team sees every new trial on the day it starts.

The GitHub issue for this outage is Axxya-Systems/issue-tracking#621.