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Best Practices for XM Directory Contacts

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About Best Practices for XM Directory Contacts

XM Directory is a central database that contains rich profiles of your customers and prospects, combining their operational and experience data. With XM Directory you can deliver personalized experiences at scale through the use of Segments, Journeys, Dashboards, and more. Keeping contact data up-to-date is crucial to ensure you are always targeting the right contact groups at the right time.

There are many ways within Qualtrics to populate your directory and keep it updated with the latest contact information. Contacts can be imported and updated from external data sources, through manual uploads, within workflows, and many other ways. See each section below for more information and instructions.

Qtip: When adding any new contacts, be sure to check your settings for merging duplicates. These settings determine how duplicates are identified and combined and can be modified in the Directory Options tab.

Contact Import APIs

The contact imports endpoint allows you to initiate a contact import, check on the progress of that import, and get a summary of the results of that import.

You can use this API to start your contact list from scratch, or to add and update contacts in bulk based on data from your internal systems. See the Contact Imports API documentation for more information.

JSON Events

JSON events allow you to trigger Qualtrics tasks based on an event(s) outside of Qualtrics. With this event type, your external software can start workflows via HTTP request.

You can use this event to add and update data within XM Directory using the XM Directory Task. See JSON Event for more information and instructions.

Contact Import Automation

Contact Import Automations allow you to automate the transfer of contact records from your server or file hosting service to XM Directory on a scheduled basis. With automations you can start a contact list from scratch, or update existing contacts.

See Contact Import Automation for more information.

ETL Workflows Tasks

These tasks allow you to import data from third-party destinations into Qualtrics using 1 or more extractor tasks and 1 loader task. Once contact data is obtained from an extractor task, it can be loaded into XM Directory with several available loader tasks.

See Building ETL Workflows for more information.

Automatic Contact Creation with Digital Intercepts

Digital Intercept Targeting allows you to create new contacts each time users visit web pages with intercepts on them. Adding contacts automatically when an intercept is evaluated eliminates the need for manual file uploads or SFTP based automations.

See Automatic Contact Creation for more information.

File Uploads

File uploads allow you to manually import CSV or TSV files filled with contact data to your directory. This option is useful for more unstructured data sources, or if you’re just not ready to automate your import process.

See Upload a File for step-by-step instructions.

Manual Input

Manual input allows you to add contacts to your directory manually. This option is useful if you don’t have your contact data stored within a file or other data source.

See Manual Input for step-by-step instructions.