In this article
1: About Contact Databases
A contact database helps you better understand your customers, employees, or other contacts by keeping their key details and interaction history in one place. This makes it easier to track their feedback and responses over time. SmartHub provides a single location for this information, such as name, email, address, gender, and age. This is referred to as the Contact database (Creating a Contact Database).
You can use a key, such as customerid or email, to link contact data across different surveys and systems. This includes transactional, relationship, and ad-hoc surveys, as well as CRM data and support emails. These connections form a one-to-many relationship, where one contact can have multiple responses across one or more surveys. A hub can include multiple types of contact databases, such as those for customers, employees, agents, and partners.
Surveys added to a hub can be linked to a Contact database using a key, such as customerid or email. You can create this link at any stage—before uploading a sample and starting data collection, during data collection, or even after the survey has closed.
Linking surveys to a Contact database provides several benefits:
You can use contact data in reporting and analytics for any linked survey without importing that data as background variables.
You only need to update one source if customer data needs to be corrected or expanded.
1.1: Important Notes
When creating a Contact database from a survey, at least one variable must be a background variable. This ensures that a key field is available. To use a background variable as the key field (or to set it as contactid), you must assign a Field width to that variable.
If you're using hierarchies in a Contact database, the hierarchy must exist in the same hub as the database
A survey must be linked to the hub before you can use it in a contact database.
2: Contact Database Header Options
1 Edit icon: Opens the Edit contact database overlay, where you can rename the database and update the contact type.
2 Delete: Deletes the contact database. A confirmation message will appear with details of the database to be deleted.
3 + Link Survey: Allows you to link an additional survey to the contact database. See Linking an Additional Survey to a Contact Database.
4 Import Override Labels: Opens a dialog where you can change the labels used for survey questions. See Editing Question Labels in Surveys.
5 Create End Users from Contacts: Lets you create and maintain a list of end users based on the contact database. See Creating an End User List from the Contact Database.
6 Manage Frequency: Opens the Contact Frequency Rules settings, where you can define limits to prevent over-contacting participants. See Contact Frequency Rules.
7 Create Job: Starts a new job based on the current contact database. Note that this function is only available under specific addon plan. For access, please contact your account representative.
3: Data Processing for Contact Databases
Data Processing for Contact Databases allows you to update, append, merge, or delete contact records based on the rules defined in your project. You can configure these actions using the Target and Action tabs to control how contact data is managed between source and target databases.
The DeleteCurrentContact() function can be used with the Delete Data execution mode to permanently remove contacts that match your selected filter.
To learn more, visit: Contact Database