Getting Started with XM Directory

About XM Directory

XM Directory lets you build your own in-house panel with rich profiles of your customers and prospects. By having an organization-wide directory of contacts, you can view profiles of different contacts’ many touchpoints with your organization, making it easier than ever to discover insights about their experience with your brand.

With XM Directory, you can create and update contact information in a central database and send surveys directly to mailing lists, samples, or segments. You can easily prevent duplicate contacts, and manage your global opt-outs for the entire directory. You can also limit the amount of times respondents can be contacted by your brand to prevent response fatigue and improve the survey taking experience.

Regardless of whether you’re an administrator looking to set up their brand new directory or a standard user who just wants to learn the basics before sending their first distribution, we have the resources to get you started with XM Directory.

For administrators looking to implement XM Directory on their brands:

• Step 1: Design Your Directory
• Step 2: Implement Your Directory
• Step 3: Improve Your Directory

For users looking to send distributions using XM Directory:

• Step 1: Preparing Contacts for Distribution in XM Directory
• Step 2: Distributing to Contacts in XM Directory

Navigating to XM Directory

To get started, go to the global navigation menu, then select Directories.

Qtip: Users with Employee Experience may see the screen below. Select Contacts Directory to continue.

Your administrator may have given you access to more than one contact directory. Try clicking the dropdown at the top of the page to see how many directories you have access to. Note that these are each distinct, and will not necessarily have the same contacts or settings in them. When you create a mailing list in one directory, it’s not added to any other directory; this same rule applies for all changes you can make.

Key Terms

You can find a quick definition for the most commonly used terms in XM Directory below:

• Directory: A directory is a collection of contacts, each with a list of attributes describing them and their interactions with your brand. Directories are a way to organize subsets of contacts and collectively manage the frequency with which they’re contacted, how records are consolidated, opt-in status, and other settings for related groups of contacts.
• Mailing Lists: Mailing lists are lists of contacts that can receive emails and survey invitations. You can create mailing lists either through file upload or manually. Unlike the directory, mailing lists are not visible to the entire organization, but are instead created in individual accounts. Mailing lists can be shared with other users or groups.
• Samples: Subgroups of participants from a contact list chosen based on a set filter and/or random size.
• Segments: Segments are dynamic group of contacts that meet a specified criteria, often grouped by their particular needs, demographics, priorities, common interests, or other identifying information.
• Distribution: This is the act of contacting people across various channels, including email, SMS, or WhatsApp, to solicit feedback.
• Embedded Data: Embedded data are additional fields you attach to a contact to describe them, such as their age, gender, region, or any information that helps you get a deeper understanding of the person and create segments for targeting and analysis. Any embedded data can be referenced in survey flow logic and can be stored or embedded as part of the response data. Embedded data is also available for updates as part of imports and automations.
• Deduplication: Deduplication refers to the process of merging contact records that represent the same person. For example, fields such as external data reference, email, first and / or last name can be used on their own or in combination to identify a single user across multiple contacts, so their information can be merged into one. Deduplication can be used to automatically merge existing contacts with new contacts created during automated imports. The process can also be run manually by XM Directory admins on existing contacts.
• Contact Frequency: Contact frequency rules control how often a person in the directory will receive messages. The rules can be set at the Directory level, List level, or Survey level.
• Roles: A role is a group of qualtrics users defined by the directory administrator(s) to facilitate access control. Administrators can choose which role has what level of access to a directory. For example, a role can be set to have manage access to a directory, while another role can have view-only access to that directory.
• Transaction Data: Transactions are events that represent information about an interaction with the brand, employee or customers at a specific point in time. For example, a transaction can be a purchase order, a click on a webpage, customer call, service request, and more.

XM Directory Lite

XM Directory Full allows you to create centralized and connected directories, preventing information on contacts from becoming siloed and out of date as different teams collect data. Additionally, XM Directory allows for running programs at scale with automations and transaction data support.

XM Directory Lite offers limited functionality, allowing you to create mailing lists and upload contacts for survey distribution. For more information, see XM Directory Lite Basic Overview.

Projects Compatible with XM Directory

You can use XM Directory to send invitations for several types of Qualtrics projects. However, not every Qualtrics project type is compatible with XM Directory.

XM Directory can be used to send the following:

• Survey projects
• Conjoint / MaxDiff
• Certain non-EX XM Solutions

In contrast, XM Directory cannot be used to distribute any Employee Experience (EX) projects. That means that no EX projects can be used with XM Directory, including Engagement, Pulse, 360, and more.

XM Directory contact data is completely separate from the employee / participant information saved in the Employee Directory. That means that data edited in one directory will never affect the other.

FAQs