Metadata and Participant attributes

To be able to make a distinction between different customer groups, to personalize your survey etc, we advise to send metadata with your respondents. How you can do this depends on the type of touchpoint you're working with. To learn how to do this for the different touchpoint types, you can consult following sources:

• Email touchpoint    
• Ask Anywhere touchpoint
• Website touchpoint
• In-app touchpoint

IN THIS ARTICLE

1. What is metadata?
2. Adding and managing metadata keys per touchpoint
1. How to get there
2. Add a new metadata key
3. Manage metadata: mandatory and visible
3. Turning dumb metadata into smart participant attributes
1. Attribute type
2. Data type
3. Context

1. What is metadata?

Metadata is data that describes other data. In the context of Hello Customer, it's data that describes your respondents or the interaction they had with your company. The two main reasons why you would add metadata are:

• Personalize your survey to increase response rates.
• Filter your results for a certain customer group and compare two groups against each other.

There are two main types of metadata:

• Personal data
  • Personal information about the respondent: email address, first name, last name, telephone number, and customer ID. These specific metadata are treated a bit differently than other metadata since they are not available as filters and are mainly used to personalize your survey. On the platform, this metadata is only shown in conversations and is not even there if your touchpoint is anonymous.
  • Information that is not sensitive but is also linked to the person, for example, the gender of a person, the birth date, etc.
• Transactional data
  • Data that describes the context of the interaction between a customer and a company Examples are:
    • In which city or country did the customer buy an article?
    • Was there a discount on the articles or not?
• Data about the actual interaction with your company. Examples are:
  • Total amount spent
  • Number of items purchased
  • Purchase date

It is important to decide which metadata you want to send to the Hello Customer platform. Only send along data that you really want to use to personalize your survey or filter on.

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2. Adding and managing metadata keys per touchpoint

2a. How to get there

You can manage your metadata keys in the settings of the relevant touchpoint.

Option 1: Click on the touchpoint settings icon of the touchpoint of your choice.

Option 2:

Step 1: Click on touchpoints in the left navigation menu

Step 2: Choose the touchpoint you want to add or manage the metadata for. If you do not find your touchpoint immediately, try clicking "show more".

Once you are in the settings of the touchpoint of your choice, you can manage the metadata keys:

2b. Add a new metadata key

To add a new metadata key, click on "Add new metadata" in the manage metadata screen:

• Choose a name for your new metadata key. In order to work properly, this name needs to be the same as the column name of your Excel or CSV file you use to upload your respondent (Email touchpoints) or needs to match the name you use in your integration code (Website and In-app touchpoints) or URL (Ask Anywhere touchpoints)
• Indicate if the metadata key is mandatory. In case a key is mandatory, respondents without a value on that key will not receive an invitation email (Email touchpoints) or answers will not be added to the platform (Ask Anywhere, Website and In-app touchpoints)
• Choose if the metadata key is visible as a filter in the platform.

2c. Managing metadata: mandatory and visible

For existing keys, you can choose whether you want to make them mandatory and if they need to be visible in the platform. You can edit these options for an existing touchpoint by clicking on the checkbox

In Email touchpoints, there are two mandatory fields you need to add for all your respondents:

• The email address of the respondent; otherwise, we are not able to send out an invitation mail to this person.
• The language in which you want to survey your respondent. This is the language in which the respondent will receive the invitation email. The person can still change the language of the survey once they fill it out.

• Participants in email touchpoints without a value for this metadata key.
• Answers without values for the mandatory metadata keys integrated in the URL (Ask Anywhere touchpoints) or in the integration code (Website and In-app touchpoints) will not be added to the platform.

Visible metadata

When you make a certain metadata key invisible, it will not be available in the platform to filter on and it will not be displayed in the conversation manager. This is mainly useful if you add metadata to personalize your survey, but that is not handy to filter on. Example:

• Key = Title
• Values = "Sir", "Madam"
• Personalized invitation mail: "Dear Sir", "Dear Madam"

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3. Turning dumb metadata into smart participant attributes

In order to make filtering on the platform easier than ever, ensure data quality and facilitate analysis across several touchpoints in the future, the concept of participant attributes has been introduced. In the general settings you can find an overview of all the metadata used throughout your organization. Here you can tell the platform of which type of values the metadata exists, so an appropriate filter can be chosen, and you can say whether it's personal or transactional data. This enriched form of metadata is what we call Participant Attributes.

Attributes that are not yet defined, will appear as 'undefined' attributes in the overview below.

3a. Attribute type

As Hello Customer, we noticed that a lot of our customers send similar data to us. Therefore, we created some predefined attributes to allow for market benchmarking in the future and to have predefined data types and context, so you need to choose less settings yourself. As a first step to define your attributes, you can indicate if your participant attribute is one of these predefined attribute types or not. In the dropdown, you will find all possible options. 

If no existing attribute type matches your data, you can select 'custom' to define your own type.

3b. Data type

Next, indicate the right data type, to have optimal filtering options in the platform - for example sliders for numerical data - and to have data validation when data starts flowing in. 

There are standard and custom attributes. If applicable, it is in your best interest to select standard attributes as they can later on be used to compare your results against the market/competition.

These are the standard attributes with their corresponding definitions:

For the custom attributes, these are the data types you can choose:

• String: the values can not be ordered. Examples are store names, regions etc.
• Currency: the values reflect an amount of money. Examples are fees paid, purchase amount etc.
• Boolean: the values are either true or false. Examples are owner of a loyalty card, VIP-member etc.
• Date: the values reflect a date in time. Examples are purchase date, beginning of contract etc.
• Number: the values are numbers and can be ordered. Examples are age, amount of pieces bought etc.

3c. Context

Indicate if your data is personal (linked to the surveyed person) or transactional (linked to the transaction itself). This context will help you ensure that GDPR ruling will be applied correctly and that generic, personal data will be available for all future transactions.

Please not that:

• Participant attributes mapped as personal will be overwritten every time the same respondent (same email address) is added to the platform
• Those mapped as transactional are linked to the specific time the respondent was uploaded.

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