Our online Distribution Portal endows you with a great opportunity: to sell your assessments as valuable digital products, to a maximized audience. As a consultant, coach or agency, you want to deliver quality advice to as many customers as possible and Distribution Portal allows you to plug into e-commerce websites through the magic of our developers’ application programming interface (better known as API).
DistributR
The DistributR Plan is a subscription package that includes the entire suite of Pointerpro products: Questionnaire Software, Report Builder, and Distribution Portal. Access the full feature list of the DistributR plan here.
Distribution Portal
The Distribution Portal is a feature included in the DistributR Plan. It allows for seamless assessment and report distribution by utilizing three different access levels: the admin zone, the customer zone, and the contact zone.
This guide will teach you:
1. Distribution Portal zones and user roles
2.1 How to add users
3.1 How to add users
3.2 How to configure user accounts
4. Distributor
4.1 How to add users
4.2 How to configure user accounts
5. Customer
6. Contact
1. Distribution Portal zones and user roles
The Distribution Portal has different zones:
- Admin zone: The admin zone is accessible to users with the Administrator, Team Member or Distributor role in Pointerpro. Here, user accounts can be added and their access to functionalities, questionnaires, reports,... can be configured.
- Customer zone: The customer zone is accessible to users with the customer role. It features a separate interface branded with the administrator's organization. Customers can invite their contacts and send questionnaires to them in this zone.
- Contact zone: The contact zone is accessible to users with the contact role. It features a separate interface branded with the administrator's organization. Contacts can see an overview of the assessments they have been invited to participate in and their previous reports.
There are different levels of permissions in the Distribution Portal, that are configurable as roles.
- Super Administrator role (optional): The super administrator is responsible for assigning administrators, managing the license, viewing general statistics, and accessing logs of the organization. This role is only used in specific organizational structures.
- Administrator role: The Administrator is responsible for managing users and their permissions, creating/managing questionnaires, and creating/managing reports. These users have access to all data created within the organization, which includes that of all other users.
- Distributor role (optional): The Distributor can create and manage his own customer accounts, send questionnaire invitations to his contacts, and view his own and his customers' results. This role is optional in the use of the Distribution Portal but available to those who wish to incorporate another hierarchical layer.
- Customer role: Users with the customer role distribute assessments to their network of respondents. They use the Customer Zone to send questionnaire campaigns to their contacts and download reports. Customers cannot edit any questionnaire or report content. They can only view or share the ones to which administrators grant them access.
- Contact role (optional): Users with the contact role are the respondents who receive invitations to complete assessments. After submitting their responses, they can download a personalized PDF report based on their results. Optionally, they can be given an account that they can use to see an overview of pending invitations and past reports.
Now let's see all the role settings one by one and how you can create and manage your own Distribution Portal.
2. Super Administrator
The Super Admin is at the top of the Distribution Portal Hierarchy. The user with this role is responsible for assigning Administrators and managing the license but you cannot view or manage data like questionnaires, reports, contacts and invitations. They are only responsible for assigning administrators to manage that data.
It is not possible to create the Super Admin role from team management, contact us at support@pointerpro.com to do it for you.
The picture below shows the Super Administrator's home screen and all the available information you are able to access.
2.1 How to add users
At the top right of the menu click on the My Team button.
Then click the Add team member button.
Enter all the necessary information and select the Administrator role from the dropdown menu.
To create multiple users at once, upload a CSV file. Click on the arrow next to Add team member and then click on Import team members.
In the pop-up window click on the Choose your file button and select your CSV file to upload it.
As Super Administrator, you can see all accounts in the organization, but you are unable to edit them.
3. Administrator
Administrators are the users who use every aspect of the Pointerpro platform. They create/manage questionnaires, reports, dashboards, and users. They also have access to all data gathered by anyone in the organization. In the DistributR plan, the main focus of an Administrator is to manage the content and the organization. The distribution of the questionnaires is still possible but can be delegated to other roles such as the Distributor and Customer.
3.1 How to add users
At the top right of the menu click on the My Team button.
Then click the Add team member button.
Enter all the necessary information and select the role you want to assign to the new user from the dropdown menu.
If you configured custom invitation emails, you have the option to select one in the dropdown menu below.
To create multiple users at once, upload a CSV file. Click on the arrow next to Add team member and then click on Import team members.
In the pop-up window click on the Choose your file button and select your CSV file to upload it.
Depending on the amount of accounts, it could take some time to process.
3.2 How to configure user accounts
As an administrator, you can manage all users and assign them roles and permissions. Just select the user from the list on the right of the My Team page. You can then select the new role you want to assign. Below the role, you can configure extra permissions for the selected user.
For example, to change a user to a Distributor, first select the member and then click on the Distributor role. It is possible to give him permission to
- create and manage contacts
- create accounts for contacts
In addition, you are able to configure the authorizations for the questionnaires, reports, and reporting dashboards.
Select if the distributor will have No Access or Share Only authorization for each questionnaire separately, No Access or View for the report and No Access or All Access for each report dashboard.
When a questionnaire has more than one PDF report, all PDFs are displayed under the questionnaire and you will have to give permission for each PDF separately. This allows you to determine which users see which reports.
The Max contact invitations field allows you to control the number of contacts that this member will be able to invite to complete this questionnaire.
For example, if you allow a member to send out 10 invitations, but he tries to send out a campaign with 11 invitations, he will see an error message that he has exceeded the number of invitations. If he creates 2 campaigns, one campaign with 5 contacts and then another one with 6, when he tries to send out the second campaign, he will see the error message that he has exceeded the number of invitations.
In the Customer Zone of the Distribution Portal, the customer will see the amount of invites that he has used in the Questionnaires tab.
4. Distributor
In the DistributR plan, the main focus of a Distributor is to create and manage Customer accounts. You can still send questionnaire invitations directly to your own contacts and monitor your own and your customer's results.
4.1 How to add users
At the top right of the menu click on the My Team button.
Then click the Add team member button.
Enter all the necessary information and select the Customer role from the dropdown menu.
Select if you will send him an activation email or not by toggling the button.
To create multiple users at once, upload a CSV file. Click on the arrow next to Add team member and then click on Import team members.
In the pop-up window click on the Choose your file button and select your CSV file to upload it.
4.2 How to configure user accounts
As a distributor, you are able to create customers and contacts and control the customer permissions. Just select the customer role and toggle the buttons at the bottom, to play with the permissions.
For example, you can assign the Customer role and give permission to
- create and manage his own contacts
- create an account for his contacts
- export response data
In addition, it is possible to configure the authorizations for the questionnaires and the reporting dashboards.
Select if the distributor will have No Access or Share Only authorization for each questionnaire separately, No Access or View for the reports and No Access or All Access for each report dashboard. Optional limited access for customers to a dashboard will be released in the future.
The Max contact invitations field allows you to control the number of contacts that this member will be able to invite to complete this questionnaire.
For example, if you allow a member to send out 10 invitations, but he tries to send out a campaign with 11 invitations, he will see an error message that he has exceeded the number of invitations. If he creates 2 campaigns, one campaign with 5 contacts and then another one with 6, when he tries to send out the second campaign, he will see the error message that he has exceeded the number of invitations.
In the Customer Zone of the Distribution Portal, the customer will see the amount of invites that he has used in the questionnaires tab.
5. Customer
Customers can be created by Administrators, Team Members, or Distributors. They get access to the Customer Zone of the Distribution Portal where they can add their Contacts and invite them to participate in questionnaires. In the DistributR plan the main focus of a Customer is to manage their contacts, invite them to participate in questionnaires, and monitor the results.
In My Team, if you group some customers together in the same group, those customers will be able to see and use each other contacts in the Distribution portal.
The Customer role can also be used internally in larger organizations. For example: global HR employees are Administrators, local HR managers are Distributors, and local HR team members are Customers, who then invite local employees as Contacts.
The Customer Zone's interface is completely different from the one the Super Administrator, Administrator, and Distributor use. It was created to be self-explanatory and built around their way of working.
This is what a customer first sees when he accesses the Customer Zone of the Distribution Portal.
Customers are able to create their own campaigns to invite people to participate in a questionnaire. They can only use the questionnaires that were assigned to them.
They can add contacts directly while creating a campaign. It's up to them if they want to use Lists to organize these contacts, upload them via a CSV, create them manually, or if they go for a hybrid setup.
They can configure the invitation email just like the other roles.
On the results page, they can view all collected responses and download the PDF reports that were granted to them.
It is possible to run different campaigns at the same time and control when those start and end. The status of each campaign can easily be found in the overview and within the campaign details.
More information about the Customer Zone is available in the Customer-facing help guide we've prepared for you.
6. Contact
Contacts are the respondents to your questionnaires. They can be invited via email, but it's also possible to create an account for them. This account is entirely optional and gives them access to the Contact Zone of the Distribution Portal. There they have an easy overview of their pending invitations and past reports.
There are no configuration options anywhere to adjust the Contact's interface.
The "Questionnaires to take" section shows any active invitations.
Below they will see the reports for different questionnaires that they have completed in the past.
What is next?
- When you've collected your results and you want to download them, there are different download options available. You can either download a bulk of survey results or choose to download files relating to individual responses. Read our guide Download your results to learn how you can do it.
- Require Contact is a feature that allows you to control who can access your survey and makes the questionnaire only accessible to contacts. If validation fails, the participant is not able to fill in the survey but a configurable message will be displayed instead.
- Do not forget to monitor your results with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google Analytics is currently the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet.