Units

Company > Units > Units

Units are the part of a company that customers interact with, such as front-line representatives, call center agents, employees, physical locations like stores or hotels, and web sites. They are the lowest common node in the organization as it relates to surveys and reporting because every interaction is between a customer and a Unit.

Important: Adding and updating Units should be done through an Importer, but may be done with the Units editor when configuring a company. Otherwise, use this account editor for exceptions and troubleshooting issues. The importer will replace any manually entered information.
Restriction: Having more than 100,000 Units can cause performance issues. If your company needs this many or more, contact the Medallia Design Experts for a scale assessment.

For overview information, see Units and unit groups.

Properties

Name
Name of the Unit. This is the name that shows up in the Units drop down in reporting.
Identifier
Unique identifier for each Unit. See Unit Identifier for more information about this property.
Tip: When building a program it is important to have a consistent naming convention for creating identifiers.
Street Address
Street address where this Unit is located. Leave the field blank, or use a hyphen ‘-’ when this value has no meaning for the type of Unit, such as for a call center agent or web site.
City
City where this Unit is located. Leave the field blank, or use a hyphen ‘-’ when this value has no meaning for the type of Unit, such as for a call center agent or web site.
State/Country
State or country where this Unit is located. Leave the field blank, or use a hyphen ‘USA’ when this value has no meaning.
Unit username relation
A comma-separated (with no spaces) list of user names to be associated with the unit. These users are notified when the unit is mentioned in a survey comment in Responses Form reports and Responses Feed modules.
Zip
Zip code or postal code where this Unit is located. Leave the field blank, or use a hyphen ‘-’ when this value has no meaning.
Unit Data Fields and Unit Groups
The remainder of the properties are the company-specific Unit data fields and Unit groups fields: the Unit Fields appear first in their Priority order, followed by the Unit Groups, in their Priority order. When the company has multiple hierarchies, the unit group fields are arranged by hierarchy, when the hierarchy name displayed as ‘---[Hierarchy Name]—:’.
Note: The set of data fields is unique for every company.

See Fields and groups, for more information.

Property is active checkbox

Whether or not the Unit is active or inactive.

When units are inactive:

  • Responses will be available on reporting. However, you cannot filter on such units.

  • Invites will not be sent for inactive units. Surveys can be submitted if the unit becomes inactive while the survey is outstanding; however, they will not appear in responses.

  • Data for inactive units appear in aggregate data and reports for surveys that were submitted while the units were active. Data for inactive units will not appear in Ranker reports, but it is possible to configure filtering so that the sample size numbers are higher than the sum of the sample numbers listed for individual units.

  • Filters do not display inactive units as options.

  • Records for inactive units will be included in data exports.

Download in Excel

In the upper-right corner of the screen, click Download in Excel to download a spreadsheet listing the unit values associated with each unit in your instance.

Download in Excel button

The last columns in the spreadsheet show the number of survey invites and the number of completed surveys for each unit. The numbers in these columns include all records, including user activity in Health Check reports (according to the e_user_activity_units field).

Columns showing invites and completed surveys

Unit Pending special-case unit

Every company has an inactive special-case unit named "*** Unit Pending" (identifier is "unitPending"). In the event a survey record is created and not associated with a proper company unit, that record is assigned to this special-case unit. This allows the record to:

  • Appear in reporting

  • Trigger alerts

  • Be exportable

When such a record is created, administrators might see a message similar to this:

“Survey ID ######: No unit assigned to the survey. Automatically assigned to Unit Pending. Adjust your survey to capture a unit for all surveys.”

These record should be identified and assigned to the proper unit to provide proper reporting and case-management. After assigning a real unit to one of these records, change the survey status to COMPLETION_PENDING to reprocess the record for alerts and reporting.

Tips and best practices

  • Have a consistent naming convention for both the Name and Identifier.

  • Unit names can be translated into other languages through the Translations Settings screen and updated through the Translations setup.

  • Do not delete Units; just make them inactive. Deleting Units can make the environment unstable.

  • Create and update Units through an Auto importer, not manually. Manual changes here are often overridden by regularly scheduled Auto Importer org updates.

  • Unit fields can be used in Survey conditions. Surveys frequently ask a question only when a particular Unit Field is not empty or has a specific value. For example, if a Restaurant Name field has a value, the question might ask, “How satisfied were you with The World’s Greatest Restaurant?”, when the name comes from the Unit field

  • Surveys are associated with a Unit, and Survey questions and invitations often include information from a Unit property or Unit Field. As such, it is important the data in those fields be clean and not include unnecessary information like the work “none” or a dash. For example, consider a question that says, “How satisfied are you with your visit to none?”

    Three examples of example Restaurant Name values: Good name: 'The Worlds Greatest Restaurant'; Bad: 'none'; Bad: "-"

  • When a Unit is not appearing in the Unit Group for reports, use the Unit screen to verify the Group is assigned to the Unit. If it is not, you can change it in the Unit editor, but you should also ensure that future imports do not overwrite the change by working with the team that provides the data to the Medallia Importer.