Total Experience profiles and Experience programs

A Total Experience Profile provides a single view for a specific customer or account. An evolution of customer tracking, it provides an aggregated view of signals, segment information as well as a timeline of comments.

Simple profiles might provide identifying information, such as a person's name, phone number and email address, but you can also create profiles that provide more detailed information, such as verbatim comments and scores from survey responses. Profiles can also show a log of recent activity between the person or account and your company, including activities taken by agents to resolve alerts.

Signal data can be more than just survey and invitation data. It could be call transcripts or purchasing transactions: anything that captures a signal about the customer or employee.

With total experience programs you can connect various signals in a customer or employee journey and tie it back to customer profiles.

Experience programs screen

The Experience programs screen lists all the available programs for that particular company instance. Experience programs are sorted by the last modified date. Use the search bar at the top of the list to search for a particular program.

Details pane

Click on an Experience program to reveal its details pane, which summarizes the most important information of the program, such as:

Created

The date and user that created the program.

Last modified

The date and user that last made a change in the program.

Program ID

Unique identifier for the program. Click Copy to copy the ID. If you want to associate records created in an importer with this program, then map e_program_id to this ID as a constant value in your data importer. When you create a new importer in the context of a program, this mapping is automatically included.

Additional information section

Lists the different assets the Experience program has. Click Manage next to each asset to access it within the Experience program editor.

Details pane menu

Click the details pane menu to:

Edit program details

Edit the program details such as name, description, and their advanced settings such as:

• Event timestamp — Select the datetime field that represents when the event that this program is collecting feedback about actually occurred. For example, this can be the date of purchase, date of support call, or checkout date, among others. If none are available, select the creation date of the record.

• Main score — Select the Main Score field for this program. This will be used in certain reporting features, such as profiles to determine what key score field should be shown in a module (such as Likelihood to Recommend or Customer Satisfaction).

View changelog

This lists the changes made in Medallia Experience Cloud, such as created, modified, and deleted entities. For more information, see Change Log.

Create an Experience program

To create an Experience program:

Manage Experience programs

Click Manage to access the Experience program editor. Click Edit program to modify the program's name, description, and advanced program details.

How to structure your Experience programs

For each experience that you are collecting feedback about, create an Experience program to store all of the assets required to collect, analyze, and act on the signals. Each program should align to a particular experience signals that are collected, such as a call with a support agent, a stay at a hotel, or a transaction.

We do not recommend creating Experience programs for specific segments (such as Region, Language, or Customer segment) if the tools in each program collect feedback about the same underlying experience unless different teams are responsible for ownership. For example, if you send the same post-stay survey to guests in China and France, you should create one program Post-stay instead of Post-stay China and Post-stay France. However, if you send a mid-stay survey to group of customers in China that is not sent to the customers in France, that case qualifies as a separate Experience program.

Generally, each live survey you are sending should only be used in one program. Although there might be exceptions, a single survey is usually aligned to one Experience program rather than multiple since it generally collects feedback about one specific experience.

Consider these notes when structuring your program:

When you are migrating existing programs originally created in Classic Setup into the Experience programs structure for the first time, consider how you want to structure your Experience programs before creating them.

If you have existing Experience programs, compare your existing configuration to your desired configuration. If our current configuration does not match the desired configuration, then you can modify your existing Experience programs and create new ones to achieve the desired structure. This documentation will walk you through how to do both.

If you are building out new programs for the first time, see Build an Experience program.

To use and access Experience programs, see Access Signal capture.

Experience program editor

The Program editor is the building area to access the different parts required to set up an Experience program. Navigate through the program editor as desired, without the need of following a specific path, by clicking through using the left navigation pane. From there, you can access:

Program manager

On the Program manager screen, you can add and remove assets to and from the program. By default, four common system fields are included in programs, but they can be removed if they are not relevant for your program.

To migrate an existing program, click Add assets to find the assets that are relevant for the program. Since assets can be used by multiple programs — for example, one Importer can ingest records for two programs — assets can be tied to multiple programs.

Click on the collapsed menu to expand it and see the links for each available asset. Click Edit in ... to navigate into any part of the program to make updates and/or create new assets in the Experience program editor or the asset link to update it directly.

To maintain documentation or analyze your program configuration offline, click Export documentation to download the summary representation of all assets into an XLSX file.

Add assets

To find assets to add to your program:

1. From the Program manager section, click Add assets.

2. Select the Asset type.

   Note: When you select the Fields asset type, Experience Cloud shows an additional filter to find the fields used in a particular survey, importer, or export, only selected fields get added to the Experience program. When you select the Reports asset type, Experience Cloud shows an additional filter to find the list of reports by assigned roles.

3. Scroll down or use the search bar at the top of the list to search for a particular asset within the chosen Asset type.

4. Select the relevant assets that belong to the program.

5. Click Add.

Once you add the assets, they are shown on the Program manager screen.

Remove assets

When some fields are not relevant or you made a mistake, remove the assets:

1. From the Program manager section, click Remove assets.

2. Select the Asset type.

   Note: When you select the Fields asset type, Experience Cloud shows an additional filter to find the fields used in a particular survey, importer, or export, only selected fields get removed from the Experience program. When you select the Reports asset type, Experience Cloud shows an additional filter to find the list of reports by assigned roles.

3. Scroll down or use the search bar at the top of the list to search for a particular asset within the chosen Asset type.

4. Select the relevant assets to remove from the program.

   

5. Click Remove.

When you select a survey or an importer to remove from the program, you can optionally select to remove the unique fields in the asset. When you select to remove the fields in the asset, then — when the asset is removed — any fields uniquely added to the program by that survey or importer are removed from the program. When you do not remove fields, then no fields used in that asset are removed.

When you remove fields while removing multiple surveys or importers, any fields which are uniquely used in those assets are removed. Consider this scenario: there is a program with only Survey 1 and Survey 2. Survey 1 uses Field 1 and Survey 2 uses Field 1. If you removes only Survey 1 and select to remove fields, then Field 1 stays in the program, because it is still used by Survey 2. If you remove Survey 1 and Survey 2 at the same time, then Field 1 is removed, because it is no longer being used by any assets in the program.

Records

Records are linked to programs via Program (a_program), which stores all the programs on a particular instance.

Records are linked to programs to make it easy for you to segment by program when building surveys, templates, reports, alerts, exports, or any other asset that you want to use specifically for records from a particular program.

While you can navigate the program editor as desired, Medallia recommends that you map Contact fields to Profile fields before you link records to an Experience program: when a Contact field has the same value in multiple records, Experience Cloud identifies those records as being from the same person, and associates the records with the same profile. This increases the speed at which Experience Cloud can process profile data. For information, see Program fields.

For example, when building a dashboard, you can filter data by a particular program so the dashboard only shows records from that specific program.

When building a condition to determine which survey to send to a customer, you can condition it to only be sent to a particular program.

Check the Records tab to see how many records are currently linked to the program.

Program field

Program (a_program) field cannot be set directly and is a calculated in this way:

1. Medallia Experience Cloud checks if Program ID (e_program_id) is set on the record and has a valid value. If so, Program (a_program) returns the same program. Program ID can be set:

   1. Directly on the record using an Importer.

   2. If the record matches a program rule while being ingested or updated.

      Note: For records created in previous Experience programs versions, Experience Cloud also checks Record schema mapping ID (obsoleted) to ensure consistency across versions.

2. If Program ID is not set on the record, Program checks if the record matches a program rule. If so, Program ID matches that program. If the record matches multiple program rules, the rule with the highest priority is chosen.

3. If the record does not match any program rules, Program ID has no value (null).

This calculation is performed every time a cache rebuild occurs (such as during a deployment) or a record is ingested or updated.

Link new records to programs

There are two ways to link records that will enter the Medallia Experience Cloud in the future to programs:

About program rules

When existing records are pumped — such as during a backfill or when a record is updated — they are checked against program rules if they are not already linked to a program via e_program_id. At this time, if these unlinked records match a program rule, Experience Cloud links them to the matching program and e_program_id is set to that program’s ID. We recommend only using program rules when absolutely necessary, as they can cause additional complexity in cases like these.

Program record linking: core concepts and best practices

Link existing records to programs

If you are creating a new Experience program as a container for the assets and records from an existing program, you may have existing records that you need to link to the program.

To link these records to the program, you can use the bulk linking tool. On the Records tab, click Bulk Link Existing Records. This opens up a modal where you can find existing records to link to the program.

The modal is pre-populated with a condition excluding any records from your search that are already in the program. Add additional conditions to find the subset of records that belong in the program.

Click Search to see how many records match the program. The data permissions for your active role’s primary permission context will be applied to the results that are shown here.

To understand more about the records that match the search, add and remove fields as columns in the data table. You can sort the columns, and search for a specific survey id. The purpose of this table is to help you learn more about the matching data so that you can feel confident you have found the correct set of records to link to the program. If you need to do a deeper analysis, or export a subset of the data, try replicating the same search using your Invitations List (sometimes called Health Check) report.

Once you are confident that you have found the correct subset of records, click Link Records. This initiates the process to link records in the background. You can track the status of the linking in the One Time Record Updates module at the bottom of the Records screen.

Click Cancel to stop the record linking at any time. If the record linking has already started, then records that have been linked stay linked, but no new records are linked.

Click Condition to view the condition that was used to find the records for this linkage.

Click the clock icon at the top of the module to review the history of one time record updates (linkages or removals).

As records link to the program, you check the number in the Records Linked to Program module grow.

Remove records from programs

To remove records that are linked to the program click Remove Records.

The modal will be pre-populated with a condition to narrow your search to records that are in the program. Add additional conditions to find the subset of records that you wish to remove from the program.

Click Search to see how many records match the program. The data permissions for your active role’s primary permission context will be applied to the results that are shown here.

To understand more about the records that match the search, add and remove fields as columns in the data table. You can sort the columns, and search for a specific survey id. The purpose of this table is to help you learn more about the matching data so that you can feel confident you have found the correct set of records to remove from the program. If you need to do a deeper analysis, or export a subset of the data, try replicating the same search using your Invitations List — also known as Health Check — report.

Once you are confident that you have found the correct subset of records, click Remove Records. This will initiate the process to remove records in the background. You can track the status of the linking in the One Time Record Updates pane at the bottom of the Records screen.

Click Cancel to stop the record removal at any time. If the record removal has already started, then records that have been removed will stay unlinked, but no new records will be unlinked.

Click Condition to view the condition that was used to find the records for this removal.

Segment records by program

If you are writing a condition in Admin Suite and want to segment by program, use the field program schema ID (a_program_schema_id), then select the program(s) that you want to segment by.

You can use this field anywhere that you need to write a condition to segment by program. We do not recommend that you use field a_program in these scenarios, as that can cause future problems with change sets since a_program is an enumerated field with sequence numbers. For example, if Experience Programs were created on sandbox and production in different orders. So, on the sandbox a_program = 1 refers to a Post-Purchase program, but, on production, a_program = 1 refers to a Contact Center program. If you try to set a survey with the condition a_program=1 from the sandbox to production, the condition will refer to a different Experience program in production. For this reason, we recommend configuring conditions with a_program_schema_id for now.

However, when you configure a control panel or a segmentation field for a module — such as for a Scores by Segment Snapshot module — and want "Program" to be available as a segmentation field, then use the field a_program, as it is easier to parse in reporting than a_program_schema_id (which shows program IDs in reporting instead of names).

Tips and best practices

• For each experience, create an Experience program to store all of the assets required to collect, analyze, and act on the signals about. Each program should align to a particular experience signals that are collected, such as a call with a support agent, a stay at a hotel, a transaction, etc.

• Do not create Experience programs for specific segments (such as Region, Language, or Customer segment) if the tools in each program collect feedback about the same underlying experience. For example, if you send the same post-stay survey to guests in China and France, you should create one program Post-stay instead of Post-stay China and Post-stay France. However, if you send a mid-stay survey to a group of customers in China that is not sent to the customers in France, that case qualifies as a separate Experience program.

• Generally, each live survey should only be used in one program. Although there might be exceptions, a survey should be aligned to one Experience program rather than multiple since it collects feedback about one specific experience.

• Consider these practices when structuring your program:

  • Use the default level of granularity for segmenting records, rather than the lowest level granularity. Think of groups that provide meaningful insights when slices and dicing data.

  • If there is a field (for example, Survey Type or Program Type) that already segments current programs for segmenting user access, reports, etc., it might represent a way to segment the data/assets into Experience programs.

  • Group records together to understand how customers find a particular experience with this company.

  • You should quickly find the assets, records, and fields that are related to each other.

• On Reports and Exports, the Program filter automatically filters the data by program. On the other assets or areas (such as Control panels, Data access, etc.), use Program (a_program) to segment records by program instead of writing custom conditions.