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XM Directory Maintenance & Organization Tips

About XM Directory Maintenance & Organization Tips

This page highlights the different features that Brand Administrators and directory administrators can use to organize XM Directory and manage directory access. Maintaining an organized directory is crucial for collecting consistent data, which will help you draw the best insights from your experience data.

Build Multiple Directories

Having multiple directories allows you to segment your contacts based on common themes or divisions that exist within your company. For example, a directory can be created to contain your product testers while a different directory can store all customer care contacts. Utilizing multiple directories also allows you to apply different directory-wide settings, so that distinct sets of contacts can have different contact frequency and deduplication rules. The Creating & Managing Multiple Directories support page has more information on setting up multiple directories.

Set Up Role-Based Access Control

Setting up XM Directory roles allows you to control who has access to your directories and who can edit the directory settings. Restricting directory access limits the number of contacts and embedded data fields that can be added to your directory, cutting down on the amount of clean-up that is needed. Role-based access control is crucial for managing multiple directories across your organization’s users.

Attention: Once you enable role-based access for a directory, that directory will be unavailable to the brand until you create a role that can access it. Therefore, there should be a role created that allows the key administrators to access all of the necessary directories.

Create Contact Frequency Rules

Setting up contact frequency rules will allow you to prevent over-sampling of your contacts. You can decide to limit either the number of messages sent to contacts over a certain period of time or set a period of time that must pass before the same contact can receive another message. Ensuring your contacts do not receive too many messages from you can help prevent survey fatigue.

Qtip: These settings apply across the entire directory, but you can create exceptions for certain surveys or mailing lists.

Merging Duplicate Contacts

Merging duplicate contacts allows you to reduce the number of contacts in your directory and ensures you aren’t distributing emails to multiple instances of the same contact. You can take steps to make sure contacts are automatically merged when they’re uploaded to your directory. If duplicates already exist in your directory, you have the ability to manually merge them.

Merging Existing Contacts

You can merge existing contacts inside the directory settings or by using the “consolidate duplicates” tool in the directory. When merging contacts, you have the option to select which field you would like to use to identify duplicates. Email is the most common field to use for merging contacts, but you can select multiple fields. All selected fields must match for duplicate contacts to be merged.

After the duplicate contacts have been identified, you can consolidate each set individually.

When merging contacts, the most recently updated embedded data value will be preserved in the consolidated contact.

Automatically Merging New Contacts

You can also choose to automatically merge duplicate contacts as they are uploaded to your directory. When you upload contacts to XM Directory, the platform will look for contacts with matching deduplication fields and update the contact records accordingly instead of creating new ones. Please keep in mind that empty fields will not deduplicate, so if merge rules are set to email and you upload a list of contacts that don’t contain an email field, they will not be consolidated. For scenarios like these, consider adding additional, back-up rules for merging contacts.

Example: I am deduplicating by email and I have barnaby@qualtrics.com already in my directory. In a new contact upload, my file contains a row for barnaby@qualtrics.com with new embedded data. When uploading my file, instead of creating a new contact for barnaby@qualtrics.com in the directory, the old contact will be updated with the new embedded data.

Remove Under-Sampled Contacts

Older directories often have large numbers of contacts that have not been surveyed for months or years. Frequently removing unused contact records will help keep your directory running smoothly.

You can easily find unused contacts by using directory filters based on contact statistics. The Created, Last modified, Last email, Last invite received, and Last response fields are useful for finding contacts based on age or responsiveness. When filtering for contacts, keep in mind that you should only include contacts who are opted into your directory, as deleting opted-out contacts could opt them into your directory if they are reuploaded. Read more about filtering contacts on Searching & Filtering Directory Contacts.

Example: In this example, we’re filtering for contacts that were last modified on or before June 30, 2020 in order to find contacts that haven’t been updated in over a year.