Quicksearch supports dividing a recipient list to automatically send surveys to a portion of customers each month evenly and randomly distributed throughout the year. This is common in customer surveys and often replaces the annual customer survey historically conducted once per year.
Transfer of Customer List to Quicksearch
As a customer, you maintain your customer list with Quicksearch. The easiest way is to regularly send an Excel or CSV file of your customers to Quicksearch via SFTP. You should overwrite the same file with each update so that Quicksearch has only one file containing the current selection list.
Selection
Quicksearch then reads the list and selects the percentage of customers to receive the survey for this period and sends a survey to them.
Requirements
For the selection to be done properly, the list needs to include some entirely numeric information randomly distributed. A good example is customer numbers, which are usually sequential numbers, or phone numbers if they always exist and do not contain other characters than numbers. A poor example would be customer category or postal code, which would group similar customers in the same mailing period.
Technical Function
In practice, Quicksearch uses a rule to determine the current period, such as month. For example, January is 1, February is 2, and so on. Another rule calculates the remainder (modulo) of the numerical information (customer number). With modulo 12, customer number 1 becomes remainder 1, customer number 2 becomes remainder 2, customer number 13, 25, or 37 becomes remainder 1. If the remainder of the customer number matches the current period, the survey is sent out. If it does not match, no survey is sent out.
The function works equally well for sending out 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 surveys per contact and year or sending out weekly (modulo 52, where week 53 is ignored).
Tips: In a B2B context, it is appropriate to use an identifier that is unique per contact at the customer, such as an ID from the CRM system rather than a customer number, as all contacts at the same customer would receive the survey in the same period, which is not desirable.
Consider: It is good to implement a blocking rule so that the same recipient does not receive a survey within 60 days. This reduces the risk of errors if the customer mistakenly uploads multiple copies of their customer list via SFTP, which should not happen. It also reduces the risk if the upload is triggered manually by a user.
Example of Rule Setting for Sending Once per Year
- Write the current month to a background variable ("Month").
- Remove any incorrect characters from the customer number field so that we can rely on it being numeric.
- Write customer number modulo 12 to a background variable ("Customer Number modulo 12").
- If the current month is not equal to the customer number modulo 12, the survey should be blocked.
- Implement a block to prevent the same person from receiving a survey within 60 days.
The technique can also be used for exporting from the CRM system so that Quicksearch only has a customer list that is the current month's recipients. An example of how such a query looks via SQL could be:
SELECT CustomerNo FROM [Customer] WHERE (DATEPART(mm, GETDATE())) = ((CustomerNo % 12)+1)