In case you would like to be notified of certain changes or outlier values during data collection immediately, click on the three dots next to the dataset in question, and choose ‘Dataset alerting’. Please be aware that the Dataset Alerting function is only available for continuous data streams, like surveys, API datasets, Email Connectors and NMI integrations.
Once you’ve clicked on Dataset alerting, a pop-up window will come up where you can choose to create an alert using presets or make one from scratch.
If you go with presets, you’ll need to:
- give your alert a name,
- add one or more recipients,
- select a threshold dimension.
The threshold dimension is a dimension of your data that our alerting module will examine and monitor for change. Depending on how your data looks, it can be:
- the values of a scale question in case of a survey,
- the number of Facebook interactions in case of integrated social data,
- the star ratings in case of app reviews.
But it can also be a textual dimension:
- an open ended question of a survey,
- the body of emails in case of connected email traffic,
- the text of posts in case of integrated social media (eg. Facebook) data.
When you’ve selected your threshold dimension, our alerting module will suggest predefined alerts (presets) based on it:
- in case it is a number, it can be an average or median value,
- if it is text, it can be related to polarity or recognized labels.
Choose one and you’re good to go. Keep in mind however that our generated preset alerts only serve as inspiration, and we really encourage you to edit your selected preset using the pencil icon next to it.
If you would like to set up an alert from scratch, you also need to fill in the name and recipients. On this screen (just like when you set an alert up with presets) you can also decide how frequently you want to be notified. The default setup is that our alerting module checks the data hourly, but only sends one email per day if your alert criteria has been matched and the alert has been triggered. We’ve kept this setup as default to not spam you with unnecessary emails, but you can change the setting by activating the toggle, meaning the alerting module will send you emails every time the alert is triggered.
Once you move to the next stage of setting up the Alert criteria, you’ll need to decide if you want a Static or a Trend kind of alert. In the first case, you only need to select an examined period. In the second, you’ll also have to have a benchmark period, and then Zurvey.io will compare the examined period’s results to those found in the benchmark period.
The rest of the available options - namely the threshold operator options - will vary depending on the threshold dimension you choose.
If you choose a number dimension for a threshold dimension (like a scale question in a survey, the number of likes, etc.) you will have the following operator options: count, minimum, maximum, median.
If you set up a text dimension as a threshold dimension (like open ended questions in a survey, email bodies, etc.), you can select to monitor the polarity category (neutral, positive, negative), the opinion index, or the recognized Custom Labels of the text.
You can also choose to add filters, in case you would like to be notified only of events occurring in certain segments of your dataset.
In the end, don’t forget to click ‘Save and exit’.
Naturally, you can set up multiple alerts for the same dataset. Once you have created one or more alerts, you’ll see them listed right after saving, or later when you click again on ‘Dataset alerting’. Here you can always manage them: edit them, delete them, or add more.
How does this work in practice?
- You could set up an alert like this for your app reviews: this static alert will send you an email if your star rating average drops below 3 in the previous 24 hours:
- In this case, the system will alert you if your calculated NPS® score decreases by 10 percentage points in the last seven days, compared to the benchmark period, which is set as the previous month:
- Here we’re setting up an alert for a text dimension: this trend alert will fire if the lowest opinion index of the texts during the last 30 days is at least 15% lower than in the previous month. In case we only want to check the opinion index of certain topics, we can add Custom Labels as filters in the Filter section.
Read more about this feature on our blog: