Contact fields

Contact fields store information related to the individuals who are asked for and give feedback. Contact field information is extracted from various touchpoints associated with the contact, including both feedback and non-feedback records such as an invitation file.

Examples of Contact category fields include Name, Email, Customer ID, or any other field that provides information pertaining to a contact such as demographic information, loyalty tier, response rate, total transaction amount, response rate, etc. Contact fields are usually E-fields, but might include K-fields that calculate, for example, an account ID.

Medallia Experience Cloud comes with these Contact fields:

Email
First name
Last name
Phone
Customer ID

There are three different ways to generate contacts in Experience Cloud:

Signals — Automatic contact generation based on signals that enter or leave Experience Cloud, including surveys, Medallia Speech, and Medallia Conversations. They create a new Contact field or update an existing one if it already exists.
Importers — Use Importers to transfer a contact or contact signal data from third-party software directly into Experience Cloud.
API — Use Public APIs to transfer customer data from their external databases into Experience Cloud.

Experience Cloud contact database can store any information about respondents. This information can then be used to enrich signals that could be lacking customer information. For example, if one of the survey responses is missing a respondent's tier, the missing information can be populated by performing a lookup on Experience Cloud contact database provided that information is present.

Use Contact fields in Total Experience Profiles

By default, existing Contact category fields are mapped to Profile fields, which are the fields available to select when configuring the Contact information, Contact summary, and Contact timeline modules in Customer Profiles.

Important: Mapping Contact fields to Profile fields should be done within the context of Experience programs.

Profiles identify individuals from their records by Profile fields that have Used for Contact identity selected. 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. Because not every record has a value for every field, you can build a more accurate collection of profiles by configuring several customer identifiers, such as Email, Phone number, Username, and so on.

If a Profile field's value is not always unique across all contacts, do not select the Used for contact identity property.

When configuring Profiles, fields which can contain non-unique values are occasionally marked as identity fields. For example, if the age field has the Used for contact identity property selected, all contacts with the same value for age are merged to the same contact profile, which is clearly incorrect.

Once merged, contacts cannot be un-merged without using Contact cleaner, which includes the removal and reprocessing of all contacts. Contact cleaner resolves the erroneous merge by enabling the user to redefine which fields have the Used for contact identity property, removing all contacts, and running a backfill to re-extract all contacts with the revised field properties.

For more information, see Contact cleaner.

Take, for example, a company that has configured Email and Username as Used for Contact identity. The company then receives feedback records containing the following information:


Record 1	Record 2	Record 3
First Name: John Last Name: Doe Email: johndoe@email.com	First Name: John Last Name: Doe Username: john123	First Name: John Last Name: Doe Username: john123 Email: johndoe@email.com

When Record 1 is received, Experience Cloud identifies a new profile for this person because one of the Profile fields (Email) has a value that had not been received before. When Record 2 is received, Experience Cloud creates a different profile because a different profile field (Username) has a value that had not been received before. When Record 3 is received, two Profile fields (Username and Email) have values. Because these values already exist in records received previously, Experience Cloud is able to reconcile that all three records are from the same person, and then merges the records into a single profile. Note that when more than one Profile field is used as identity, they work in an OR logic.

Profile mapping

Profile mapping may happen in two different scenarios:

When creating a new Contact field.
When converting a field with a category other than Contact to a Contact field.

Create a new Contact field

On the Experience program editor, navigate to the Fields section.
Click New field and select Contact field.
On Basic details and settings, complete the details of of your field. The following image shows a new Contact field New Customer ID:
On Profile mapping, click Select Profile field.

A Contact field must have a corresponding Profile field to create Profiles. This field is the one that obtains the values of this existing Program field being edited. In the following example, CUSTOMER_ID is selected as a Profile field and it will map all the values that New Customer ID Contact field has.

If your instance does not contain any Profile field to select or you want to create a new Profile field to map this existing field, click Add and complete the details under Profile field settings, below.
Click Select.
Click Profile field settings and complete the properties. See Profile field settings below for more details.
Click Continue.
Click Save.

Convert a field to Contact category

Restriction: Only Case Management, Event, Feedback, Formula, and Segmentation categories can be changed to Contact category.

From Experience programs screen, select the program to set Profiles on and click Manage.
Note: The Experience program selector always lists all Experience programs in the instance, regardless of role-based data access.
On the Experience program editor, navigate to the Fields section.
Select the Case Management, Event, Feedback, Formula, or Segmentation field you like to use for Profiles, for example Event field Account ID, and click Edit.
On Basic details and settings, navigate to Field category and change it to Contact. This reveals the Profile mapping property, which maps the values of this existing field to a new Profile field to use in Profiles.
On Profile mapping, click Select Profile field.

This field is the one that obtains the values of this existing Program field being edited. In the following example, Customer Account ID is selected as a Profile field and it will contain all the values that Account ID Contact field has.

If your instance does not contain any Profile field to select or you want to create a new Profile field to map this existing field, click Add and complete the details under Profile field settings, below.
Click Profile field settings and complete the properties. See Profile field settings below for more details.
Click Continue.
Click Save.

To change the Contact category back to its original category or to another category, select the new category from Field category. If the Contact field is mapped to a Profile field that has Used for Contact identity selected, deselect that property first. See Used for Contact identity below for more details.

Profile field settings

Complete these properties to configure the Profile field settings:

Field name: Name of the Profile field.
Field ID: Unique name used to identify the Profile field in Experience Cloud. FIeld ID supports lowercase letters and underscores.
Data type: Data type defined for the Contact category field. This is inherited from the Contact field Data type. For more information, see Data types.

Additional settings

Optionally, select any of these Additional settings:

Tip: You can use these settings to filter Contact fields that are mapped to Profile fields. For more information, see Program fields screen.

Used for Contact identity (isIdentity)

Indicates the Profile field is used to identify contact information to tie records together to build a Profile for an individual. Up to 3 Contact fields per experience program can have the Used for contact identity property.

If more than one Profile field has this property selected, Experience Cloud considers any of the Profiles fields (OR condition). For example, if Email and Account ID have Used for contact identity selected, Experience Cloud identifies the feedback records with either Email or Account ID information as coming from the same person.

Tip: Enable this setting if this field's value is unique across all contacts. Examples might be a unique customer ID or an email address. A contact's identity becomes the combination of all Profile fields with Used for contact identity enabled.

If the field's value is not unique across all contacts (for example, First Name), do not select Used for contact identity.

Important: Do not enable the Used for contact identity property for Contact fields that may have placeholder values (for example, email@example.com), as this may lead to erroneous contact merges.

Restriction: There is a limitation of 20 different combinations of unique identities. Exceeding this limit may result in performance issues.

If you want Used for Contact identity to impact historical data, contact your Medallia expert to run a Backfill.

To deselect this property, contact your Medallia expert to run Contact cleaner.

By default, Email (e_email) is marked as Used for contact identity.

Personal identifiable information (isPii)

Determines whether information in this field is displayed for users without the role-level permission required for viewing personally identifiable information. If the user does not have that permission, the data is masked. For example, if the field data is a text string, only the first and last characters display with asterisks between them. This setting affects only how the data is displayed, not the underlying data itself. For more information, see

Indexed for searches (isIndexed)

Indicates the Profile field can be used for searches in the Contact List module.

Restriction: Only 5 fields can be indexed per instance. If inactive, unselect this property from any existing Profile field to make it available.

Optionally, click Maps to X other contact field to see the Contact fields the Profile field is mapped to.