Surveys - Quarantine

Quarantine overview

Quarantine is a way to prevent the same customer to be invited into multiple surveys at once. This approach revolves around the concept that if the customer was invited once they shouldn't receive other invites shortly after that. This allows to prevent an impression of spamming if your company's CRM business logic puts the same customer into multiple imports.

Quarantine status is checked at the moment of import file upload. VoC Feedback is aware of the Questionnaires that already exist in surveys and can check if the customer was already invited to any of those surveys.

The survey which the customer is being imported into is called "Affected survey". The other surveys to which the customer could have been already invited are called "blocking" or "delaying" surveys/criterias.

Quarantines Settings can be found in Global Settings - Quarantines tab:

Action type

Block - the invitation won't be created if imported Customer ID or custom criteria meets the condition of quarantine rule;

Delay for n day(s) - the invitation will be created in set (n) number of days, if imported Customer ID meets the condition of quarantine rule; 

Important Note: 

• The quarantine rule is checked against Customer ID only. Customer ID is case-sensitive for quarantine checks. Example: value "qwerty" and value "QWERTY" are different values, in this case, the quarantine check will allow both to pass them for the invitation.
• A quarantined customer won't be imported after the quarantine period is over unless a new import process is initiated.
• Delayed questionnaires remain in "Created" state until receiving "Invited" state when the time comes.

Criteria/Condition/Value

Quarantine rule can rely on three types of Criteria with several possible Conditions:

-rule against specific survey or All surveys

-rule against imported metadata

-rule against random number

These criterias can be combined by operators AND OR to meet more versatile rule. 

Multiple settings per one affected survey

For multiple "Delay" settings:

In case of two or more "Delay" action types per survey, the rule with highest delay value will take advantage.

Example: for true Action type "Delay" for 7 days in one rule and true Action type "Delay" for 5 days in second rule, the rule with 7 days will be applied. 

For multiple "Block" settings: 

For multiple “Block” quarantines per survey, any first true rule will be applied. 

For multiple "Delay" and "Block" settings:

For multiple settings with different action types, the quarantine is checked against "Delay" action first and only then against "Block" action.

So, If we have both “Delay” and “Block” quarantine configured, first we check “Delay” rules, and if any of it is true we update actual invitation time to a new “delayed invitation time”, and only then we go through “Block” quarantines, but we:

1. Checks performed against "delayed invited time" if exists, if not then against actual invitation time.
2. The “Days since last invitation” and "Days until next invitation" conditions are correlated with the newly retrieved "delayed invitation time" but not the actual moment of import.
3. In case of both true "Delay" rule and true "Block" rule, the "Block" will take advantage and the invitation will be quarantined despite being delayed according to the first rule.

As a result, we can delay invitation but also can quarantine such invitation in future.

Example A

First example represents "Delay" action type in conjunction with metadata filter to import "Customer Care" survey.

In this situation, if the imported record will be having metadata column "q nps" and value <= 3 and if this Customer ID was previously invited in any survey within last 10 days then the invitation will be delayed for 5 days:

Example B

In second example we add "Block" quarantine rule to "Customer Care" survey:

and perform import with the same record on 21.01.04 again, the record will be quarantined because "Block" action is true (3 days since last invitation) despite "Delay" being also true:

Example C

In this example we want Client to receive an invitation on a survey only if he/she didn't receive any other invitations from the major part of other surveys. We have a Block of "All surveys", but what if we need to block certain surveys, and leave the other surveys untouched?

One way to block specific surveys is adding each survey as a separate quarantine:

A quarantine shown on the screenshot means that the Client will receive an invitation for the Medife Demo Survey if he/she didn't receive an invitation for other 3 surveys mentioned in the Criteria for the last 7 days.

However, if we have 100 surveys in total and we want to make sure, that Client will receive an invitation only if he/she didn't receive an invitation from the other 98 surveys in the last 7 days, it will be very difficult to add all 98 surveys as a separate criteria.

For this case the following quarantine will be applied:

A quarantine shown on the screenshot means that the Client will receive an invitation of the Medife Demo Survey if  he/she didn't receive an invitation frmo All surveys for the last 7 days, expect for 2 surveys mentioned as additional conditions, because for those 2 surveys we don't need to wait a 7 days period, therefore we exclude them from All surveys.

Default quarantine rules

By default, for each new Survey, a rule is taken from Global Settings -> Common -> Common Options -> Quarantine period (in days):

Which results in a default rule for all new surveys:

Started survey expiration (in days) stands for the expiration of surveys (questionnaires) that were started, but not completed.

Survey expiration (in days) stands for the expiration of surveys (questionnaires) that were invited.

Note: 

• You cannot create a new Survey if you don't specify a default amount of days for automatically created Quarantine rules.
• In order to allow constant invitation simply remove the quarantine rule within survey. The mentioned in the screenshot above 30 days quarantine period will be ignored:

The other option to allow constant invitation would be the following rule:

Random 1 - 100

There's a possibility to invite random number of imported records.

When enabled - every record when processed on quarantines have random value from 1 to 100 linked to it. When we have such kind of criteria - we use this value. If we have multiple quarantine rules applied to the same survey with this criteria - in all checks we use the same random value per record.
After contact imported successfully this value is not stored.
If import of contact was blocked or delayed by rule with such criteria - in the import error message you'll be able to see the random value related to the record.