HowToScream 2024 - Community SFMC Horror Stories
Published on 10/25/2024
With Winter '25s bleak enhancements sat in our recent memory, as the pumpkin spices our lattes and spooky Salesforce Agents threaten the very fabric of our reality, it's time to look back at some of the scary moments members of our community have had. If you're going to jump at the sight of an Appy apparition, a scary SaaSy or a Zombie Zig the Zebra, turn away now and save yourself the dry cleaning bill.
For everyone else, steel your nerve and take a deep breath for HowToScream 2024.
I had set up the perfect SSO for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, confident that all was secured—until someone accidentally deleted the non-SSO backup user account. The next day, SSO failed, locking out everyone, and the realization hit me: there was no way back in.
We all know that SSO is great for keeping your SFMC org secure. Not managing more credentials, multiple passwords and all of the important good that it does. But, nobody dares warn you about what happens when SSO goes so very wrong. On that day you wake up and SSO is down or SSO is broken and there is no way back in to your org. You may keep a key under the flower pot for those days and have a backup user without SSO. But what happens when someone takes that key? When someone deletes the account? What do you do when you're trapped outside the org. All of those scheduled jobs happening, even if you need them to stop. Standing helpless on the outside, wishing that SSO hadn't failed you.
This horror face by Aman is one that sits in the back of every SFMC user, or if it didn't before; maybe it does now.
Aman has faced more than the one horror and shares the tale of when an request for a single email resulted in 10,000 responses. Be careful with your CC's & BCC's on sends. You don't want to be in the storm of multiple Super Messages, wondering why your Gmail inbox isn't accepting emails anymore or even just your corporate mailbox filter thinking you're getting a few suspicious messages. But, it's not just Aman who has suffered this fate. Poor Lesley has recalled a story of a journey sharing 50,000 messages through a BCC gone wrong. If you're personalising your subject lines, that's a lot of ghastly messages to clean up!
A member of our community has reached out and shared some of their in platform nightmares. Chandler has shared some of those instances where the gremlins are working within us rather than just against us.
Make sure you read the map and read it twice before you follow the path. Chandler picked up a haunted map and it took him down the wrong path, with the wrong Data Extension field mapped to the SubscriberKey for the sending relationship. This SubscriberKey slip up is scary enough if you're just worrying about duplicate rows in your billable Contacts. It's even worse when the value in that field is in use by another Subscriber! Not just duplicate records but experimental merging of data in unintended and unexpected ways. Dr Frankenstein would be pleased if this came to life!
When you feel the need to give peace a chance and turn the triggers off, there's often times where you need to reload and fight back against the hordes of customers who are due to pay or overdue to pay their next installment. If you forget to reactivate your triggers, who's going to notice when things stop bouncing back? Keep an eye on those triggers everyone, you never know when you'll need to be armed and ready to go!
An anonymous community member shared some terrifying number based horror stories that will send shivers down everyones spines. We all know one of the best ways to keep your SFMC org working smoothly is to rid it of data so old it's got cobwebs, spiders and is probably haunted. Contact deletion is a great way to do it, but you have to make sure that you are deleting the correct old spooky data. Using the right > or < when it comes to taking the data out of your org is critical or you may wake up to the scarier nightmare than old data - No data at all. Remember, check twice and delete once.
The number based spooky tales don't end after this though.
A bounce rate made up of ghost bounces. 600% of sends bounced. Bounced from what? Is there spectral beings in your SFMC org?
Be careful out there!
It's not too controversial to feel that a little bit of teamwork can help overcoming these horrifying moments. People you can rely on, people who you can trust to always have your back in the face of adversity. But, then there is the beast of Internal IT. When all you need is a friend or a helping hand, sometimes all you get is a slap on the wrist and a service management runbook instead. Keeping a clients Internal IT on side is one way to make your life easier, but if you can't do that then you may end up dealing with a Freddy Krueger style nightmare!
Sometimes your teammates just don't think things through. They just start plugging things in and unplugging things without thinking about the onward impact. The moment of dread when you notice that someone has switched their Marketing Cloud Connector to a different Sales Cloud instance. Pulling the plug on all of your journeys, all of your data and all of your automations and wondering to yourself how you're going to rebuild this whole thing.
Poor Duc having to face all of this!
It is far too easy to have to face the demons, ghouls and skeletons of SFMC. But, if you'd like to be around a team that is a little less like the teams community member Duc has mentioned and a little more supportive, come and join us on HowToSFMC Slack. Come and share your horror stories or ask the community to help you avoid your own entry for next years HowToScream!