Bringing Suspended Workflows back to Active Manually

[Mike Hillman]

Not sure if anyone had any ideas on this one

We use the External Authorisation node in workflows to send approval requests - I set it to expire after 3 days, after which it loops back round, prompts the agent to confirm the approver is still right, gives them a chance to change it if needed and resends the email to prompt the approver again

A problem we get frequently is that once the approver has been entered and the Authorisation email sent, the customer comes back and tells us that approver has left/moved/changed/off sick/on leave (delete as appropriate). We then have a list of secondary approvers we can fall back on, however the issue we have is that the workflow is suspended pending the approver responding to the email (which they won't as they're not there) or until it expires (which is 3 days away, and the customer won't wait that long, so we get a lot of shouty nagging)

so my question is - is there anyway, via perhaps a custom button, that we can bring a suspended workflow back to being active ahead of the expiry in this scenario, so we can continue processing (i.e. loop things back round, amend the approver and send the email again) without having to wait it out or wait for an approval action we know isn't going to come?

[Jim]

I currently have to go and dig out the email that was sent and mark as rejected for it to loop on ours, a more defined option would be preferred such as cancel pending authorisation etc, I would be curious to see what an auto task setting it to suspend in the past would do, but it may still be focused on the authorisation action 

[Jim]

 

[Steve Giller]

You cannot "force" a Workflow past a Suspended state.
I would suggest having a shorter expiry time, if the waiting for the expiry is what's annoying your customer(s).

 

[Mike Hillman]

29 minutes ago, Steve Giller said:

You cannot "force" a Workflow past a Suspended state.
I would suggest having a shorter expiry time, if the waiting for the expiry is what's annoying your customer(s).

 

This is a bit of a shame if I'm being honest - shortening the expiry isn't really an option, they're set to what they are for operational reasons

I can think of a number of situations where, with the best will in the world, we've tried not to set the expiry to wait for too long but something out of the ordinary crops up which causes us to have to try and progress the ticket more quickly, especially with the nature of our work - as it stands we end up having to work outside of the ticket and add all the notes etc when the ticket catches up, which isn't ideal as our agents are already pretty overloaded so this tends to get forgotten. Digging out the email from the sent items and actioning it ourselves, again in our environment, is generally a no-no for various reasons

Being able to manually override a suspended workflow to get it to forget whatever it's waiting for and just get moving again would be extremely useful to get us out of the issues without having to fudge round them

[Steve Giller]

This would be a use case for upgrading to Authorisations, which could be configured so that they could be actioned by a Team Member and the Workflow could respond to that by, for the example above, creating a new Authorisation for the backup Approvers.