Resending Failed Faxes

You can configure a process to more easily resend failed faxes that have previously been sent but the status resulted in Not Delivered. Using the flexibility of Salesforce you can configure this process to meet your specific business needs. Here are some things to think about:

1. Take a look at the Status Detail field on the Sent Fax records where status is Not Delivered. Consider building a report and grouping by this field to get an idea of why the faxes are not being delivered. The goal is to understand the cause to best decide how to configure a resending process. The most common reason for faxes not being delivered is a bad fax number. If thats the case you need to take into account updating the fax number before resending.
2. The fax app is already built for retrying fax attempts if the receiving fax number was busy or a connection dropped. There is built in logic to retry over a 24 hour time period to make a successful connection. So the reason of a line being busy is not typical for an end Not Delivered result.

To Resend a Fax:

• To resend a fax you need to create another Sent Fax record. Each Sent Fax record represents one attempt to send a single fax. So each attempt would need its own Sent Fax record. You can review our Fax Automation article for details on automating sending a fax.
• Thinking about the business case and how you send faxes normally you need to configure a process that makes the most sense for your configuration.
• For example you could simply clone a Sent Fax record but set the Status to “Sending” and “Sent with Outbound Message” to TRUE and “Status Detail” to empty to send that same fax to the same fax number with the same attachments.
• Or for example if you need to update the Fax Number which comes from some other field such as the Account.Fax you will want to build that logic to get the updated fax number instead of copying the Fax Number from the failed Sent Fax record.
• Here is a suggested process for resending a fax you can configure and adjust to your needs:
  • Create a picklist field on the Sent Fax object called “Resend Fax” with picklist values “Resend Now” and “Resent”.
  • Create a lookup field to the Sent Fax object called “Resent Fax”.
  • Create a Flow on the Sent Fax object with the criteria that Resend Fax = “Resend Now”. The action would be to create a new Sent Fax record. Copy all the field values from the current Sent Fax record except:
    • Status = Sending
    • Send Date = Current Date/Time
    • Detailed Fax Status = blank/null
    • DOCID = blank/null
    • Sent Date = blank/null
    • Number of retries = blank/null
  1. Consider if need to get the fax number from the related record.
  2. After the Sent Fax record is inserted to send the new fax, the next step in the Flow would be to update the current Sent Fax record field “Resend Fax” picklist value to “Resent” and to set the lookup field of “Resent Fax” to the newly created Sent Fax record. This allows you to track that this failed fax was resent and also easily click to see the newly sent fax via the lookup.
  3. Using this new Resend Fax picklist field you can create list views on the Sent Fax object to look at Sent Faxes that need to be resent with the criteria that Status = Not Delivered and Resend Fax does not equal “Resent”.
• You can configure a similar process to execute from elsewhere in Salesforce using the same logic or create a button on the Sent Fax called Resend Fax that would go to a visual flow to confirm the fax number and click a button to submit which will then execute the flow to create the Sent Fax record. Or if you have any fax automation that was sending the fax and generating the document to fax you can simply re-execute that process. This might be good if you are merging a fax number into the document such as in a coversheet.