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A contact database allows you to gain greater understanding of your customers, employees or other contacts, by creating a central store of their key information and a history of their transactions. This enables you to track their feedback and responses over time. The hub uses a single repository for all the data, such as name, email, address, gender, age etc. known as a “Contact database” (go to Creating a Contact Database for more information).
Using a key such as “customerid” or “email”, you can link to all the different data sources with contact data (transactional/relationship/ad-hoc surveys, CRM data, support emails etc.), in a one-to-many relation (one contact, several responses in one or more surveys). Several types of contact databases can be included in a Hub, for example databases for customers, employees, agents, partners etc.
Surveys that are added to a hub can be linked to a Contact Database using a key (for example customerid or email). This linkage can be performed at any stage: before sample is uploaded and data collection has started, and also during data collection or even after the survey has been closed.
This provides the following benefits:
- Users can use data from the contact database in reporting and analytics on any survey that is linked, without first having to bring all the customer data into the survey as background variables.
- There is only one repository to maintain if data must be corrected, new customer data must be added etc.
The key field in a contact database, used to uniquely identify the contacts, is the system field contactid. This will be set up in the contact database automatically by the system.
Overview Page
The Overview page for a contact database provides you with information about the database. This is the first page that opens when you create a new database (go to Creating a Contact Database for more information). To open the Overview page for a database, go to the Contact Databases item in the quick access menu and on the Contact Database List page click on a blue ID link, or when a database is open, go to the Contact Database Overview menu command. The Overview page opens - .
Figure 1 - Example of the Overview page for a contact database
The fields and other information on the General tab are as follows:
- Contact Database ID – system-generated unique identification number. This is created when the database is created, and cannot be changed.
- Contact Database Name – a title you choose for the database.
- Company – your company’s name.
- Description – here you can enter a more detailed description of the database, so it is more easily identifiable when you (or someone else) returns to it at a later date.
- Languages – here you select the working language(s) that are to be used in your database. The Available field contains all the supported languages; the Selected field contains the languages available to your database. Highlight a language in the Available field and click the >> button to add it to the Selected field. Once a language has been selected, you can edit the messages for that language to suit the particular database (go to Editing a Survey Message for more information). Note that due to space restrictions on the editing pages you can work with up to five languages at one time. Select the languages that are to be editable in the Active Languages page (go to Active Languages for more information).
- Categories and Keywords – you can categorize the database. There are three predefined categories: Template, Library, and Benchmark for Reportal benchmark functionality.
- New Keyword - In addition to the predefined categories, you can add your own free text categories, for example "Demos", "E-SAT", "Brand recognition", etc. You can then use these categories when searching for databases in all parts of the application (including Reportal).
- Creator - the name of the user who created the database.
- Created - the date the database was created.
- Last Modified - the date the database was last edited.
- Status – the database status. This can be Design (before the database is generated),
- Enable Database Encryption - select this option to encrypt the database when it is generated. Note that it is not possible to change the encryption state of a generated database; once a database is generated, if you wish to change the encryption state you must create a new database.
Note: Database encryption is a company add-on and is subject to payment. If your company does not have the add-on, then the option will not be available in the Launch Survey page.
- Contact Database Titles - this currently has no function.
- Administrator Info - information that may be useful to the administrator.
Permissions
For all contact databases, the user who creates the database is the database administrator and owner, and a database is initially invisible to all other Forsta Plus users. All Forsta Plus users in your organization will be listed in the Permissions page, and the database administrator can give other users permission to view the new database.
The details and functionality for the database permissions page are identical to those of the survey permissions page (go to Permissions for more information).