Journey Builder: Best practices and troubleshooting

In this article, we'll cover some common issues that you might need to troubleshoot when working with Journey Builder:

• Adding “Wait for duration” between Send and Split

• Problem: SMS message is not delivered in specific countries

• Problem: SMS message is not delivered to specific numbers

• Problem: The journeys are not working in certain business units

• Problem: when sending WhatsApp, Line, Viber, or SMS messages, the messages are sent but their status appears as failed in the journey report

Adding “Wait for duration” between Send and Split

Since Send is an asynchronous step, if we put a Split step right after Send, it is possible that the result won’t be available at the evaluation time, and Split won’t be able to continue the journey.

Sometimes the result for Send is returned really fast, that's why sometimes the journey works correctly even if we don't have a Wait step; however, in most cases, the journey will fail to proceed beyond the Split step.

The solution is to have a wait cycle between the SendSMS step (or SendWhatsApp) and before the Split step.

Problem: SMS message is not delivered in specific countries

In Journey Builder it appears that the SendSMS step is correctly executed, but the SMS message is not delivered in specific countries.

By default, SMS sending is not enabled in all countries. You have to request and enable access from your MessageBird Dashboard if you wish to send SMSs from either JourneyBuilder or our WebApp to one of the following countries:

• Canada

• Denmark

• Malaysia

• United States of America

• New Zealand

Problem: SMS message is not delivered to specific numbers

In Journey Builder it appears that the SendSMS step is correctly executed, but the message is not delivered to specific numbers.

Please make sure that the recipient's number is in international format (country code included). Otherwise, the system might not be able to infer the destination country.

• For a US number: correct 14088001500, incorrect: 4088001500

• For a Singapore number correct 6567355020, incorrect: 67355020

Problem: The journeys are not working in certain business units

The business unit’s connection settings might not be set or not set correctly. Please visit the Admin Settings, and make sure all the information is right.

The connection settings (API key and secret) are stored individually for each business unit—this means that you will need to ensure that each business unit is correctly configured by going to AppExchange on the main navigation, selecting the MessageBird (Demo), and clicking the Admin Settings blue button.

Problem: when sending WhatsApp, Line, Viber, or SMS messages, the messages are sent but their status appears as failed in the journey report

When creating a new journey via the Copy Journey command, the custom activity references are not correctly copied.

Either create a journey from scratch or, in the copy, remove and re-add the MessageBird Send activities.