Contacts

Panels require continuous maintenance in order to keep up the willingness to respond and quality of answers. Various tasks must be performed to ensure this.

Contact Request List

Visitors to the panel site and panelists can write to the panel operator via the contact form which is usually available in the external view. The contact requests are delivered to the specified recipient via e-mail and are also documented in the admin area.

Viewing contact requests in the admin area

In the People → Contacts menu, you can view, search, and edit the contact requests of the panel.

The overview lists all requests along with their dispatch dates, subjects and contents, senders, editors, request status, and language versions. You can download this list via the Excel export and CSV export buttons.

The following editing options are avaliable:

• Detail view for contact request: Opens the detail view where you can view the full content of the request.
  • Via the Send reply button you can respond directly.
  • You can also assign a particular request status. The available request statuses are “Open”, “Currently edited”, “Closed”, “Assigned to contact manager”, and “Feedback from panelist requested”.
  • You can also assign an editor. This may be your own account or any of the previous editors.
• Send reply: Opens the standard mail dialog.
• Delete: The request will be deleted.

Groups (Portals)

With Groups, portal users can create predefined or individual groups and use them as contact lists for the Feedback Assistant module by inviting contacts from Groups to participate in Feedback Assistant surveys. Groups enables quick and easy access to a circle of members as well as the dynamic adaption of the display of logged in members of a circle for portal users accessing this circle.

On one hand, Groups is used as an integrated module in Feedback Assistant to invite participants from Groups to a survey, on the other hand, Groups is used as a separate module in Portals for the organization of groups. There are two different kinds of circles. In the integrated module, Personal Groups as well as Managed Groups can be selected, whereas the separate module exclusively enables the creation and management of Personal Groups.

Personal Groups

Personal Groups can be created in the separate Groups module. With Personal Groups, portal users can create their own contact lists from the participants of a portal and manage them. Personal Groups therefore consist of an undefined group of people and are very flexible. Personal Groups are only available for the circle creator who can define available portal users as members of the group.

Managed Groups

Managed Groups can be generated in the administration area of EFS. They consist of a dynamic composition of hierarchically dependent groups of peopleand only need little time to be created. Managed Groups can be accessed by any portal user who is a member of the respective circle.

Technical setup of Personal Groups

• To create Personal Circles, open the added module Circles in the exterior view of  your portal.
• Click on the button Add new Group.

An entry mask is opened.

• Click on Add contacts and select from the contact list via “plus” button the persons you want to be members of your group.
• To confirm the selection of circle members, close the entry mask with the big.

The newly created group is viewable on the circles page of the exterior view.

Technical setup of Managed Circles

To create Managed Groups, open People > Contacts > Groups.

The technical setup of Managed Circles mainly includes the following aspects:

• First, a Panel Group has to be selected as basis of the circles. The panelists being part of this group will be filtered according to the following defined variables.
• In the variables menu “Find Matches in following variable”, you define the variable of the portal user who is logged in to the portal, for example “uEmail”.

• n the variables menu “Group circles by following variable”, you define the reference value according to which the circle will be grouped, for example “mManager”. Under People → Master data → Create master data, you create the respective master data beforehand, for example “mManager”.
• In the variables menu “Variable for Circle Label”, you can optionally define the label of the grooup. There are two possible options in doing so:
  • Not setting the variable: With this option, only the title of the circle is shown in  the exterior view, specified under People → Contacts → Groups → Name.
  • Setting a variable: With this option, the content of the variable is shown in the exterior view instead of the group‘s title.

Acess to the portal

To manage the access of panelists to the portal, open Portals → Settings → Access permissions. If the setting in the field “Access permission for panel groups” is set to “Registered users” (standard setting), all users of the circle with access to the portal will be shown. To restrict the display of portal users to a certain panel group, select the setting “Group members” in the field “Access permission for panel groups” and add the respective panel group.

Setup of Managed Circles via grouping filters

Use group filters and update rules to set up groups as basis for your group and adapt your group this way. The bigger the basis group, the more members the respective group will have. The smaller the basis group, the less members will be in the group.

To implement group compositions in your project setup, proceed as follows:

• First, define your master data under People → Master data → Create master data, for example “md_brand” and “md_brand_responsible” as matching variables.
• Create a group under People → Groups → Create group. In addition to the group title, you can optionally add a description of the group as well as create a group category to organize your data.
• Filters are used to define which panelists will be added to certain groups. Create a group filter under People > Groups > Grouping filters.
  • Grouping of detractors for NPS calculation (Example)
  • md_nps less 6 AND md_nps greater/equal 0 (Example)
• Open People > Groups > Update rules and define the update rules according to which you want your group to be updated at a certain time.
• Upon the creation of the update rules, note the following aspects:
  • Select a Group category and the group you want to be updated. This group should obviously be the same as the one used in Circles.
  • Activate the automatic execution of the update via respective checkbox.
  • Set a Start time.
• Create the following Defined actions which are to be executed:
  • Empty group - in case data of users have changed, members who are no longer relevant will be removed from their groups this way.
  • Apply grouping filter - select your created filter.
  • Select the Filter operation according to the grouping filter - for example “Add panelists that match condition”.
  • After execution of the update rules, all panelists corresponding to the grouping filter will be added to the panel groups in Panel and Circles [in this example].
  • You have created a circle, its content complying dynamically with your grouping filters in People.

User managed groups

To avoid confusion when managing groups in Portals, we’ve made it simpler. The person who creates a User-managed group is defined as the ‘owner’. Only group members can view a public group, and only the owner can edit the group. Thus, only group owners can publish or make changes to a groups. This is consistent across all modules in Portals, so when inviting new people to a Portal using the Portal Invitation module you can only select groups that you are the owner of.

Reported Posts

In the People → Contacts → Reported posts menu you will find all abuse reports received.

• Per default, only the open reports are shown. To display reports with other statuses, please use extended search.
• The tab Frequently reported posts displays the open reports grouped by target post. I.e. if there are several open reports for a post, you will notice on first glance.
• If a post has been reported repeatedly, you can change the processing status of all these reports en bloc. To do so, open one of the reports, change status and editor and add your comment. Then, before Saving, activate the “Batch processing” checkbox. This will ensure that your status change is applied to all reports for the respective target post.

Send e-mail

An additional mail dispatch function is located in the People → Contacts → Send e-mail menu. This was developed in order to enable you to target e-mails at individual recipients, including recipients who are not panel participants, i.e. for whom no address data exists within EFS Panel.

The function appears in the same layout as the other mail dispatch functions that are available in EFS Panel. You can access all sender addresses and mail templates you are authorized to use. However, please note that you cannot use wildcards (e.g. #url#): This is only possible with dispatch functions that access the contents of the People database.

Controlling Dispatch Processes

Panels often require the sending of large quantities of e-mails. Accordingly, options for controlling the dispatch process are important:

The Mail queue in the People → Contacts menu provides not only the list of e-mails to be sent, but also the option of intervening in dispatch processes that have not yet been completed. Refer to the manual “EFS Survey”.

Dealing with Undeliverable E-Mails

Undeliverable e-mails are usually sent back to the e-mail address you specified as them sender. But you can also specify a different address in the “Reply-To” field of the mail form. Please refer to the notes in the manual “EFS Survey”.

You can use shareware tools to extract the e-mail-addresses from the bounced mails. After that, you must search for the respective panelists manually in order to deactivate or delete them.