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I have built the first survey for staff members to make an annual declaration, and from there some information is collected and saved in the contact list by the XM Directory function. 

Department Heads are sent with an anonymous link to enter a second survey. Each staff member is assigned with a 6-digit authentication key.   After clicking the anonymous link, Department Heads will first log in the company portal and then enter the 6-digit key. After the authentication, the information of a particular staff member (which is saved in the contact list) will appear in the second survey by pipped text function. His/her Dept Head will then review the information and consider to endorse the declaration or reject it. 

Because each Department Head will have to endorse several annual declarations, I have to make sure the pipped text function work well. Therefore I made the following setting at the recommendation I received in the Qualtrics Community: 

  1. Check ‘Require respondents to authenticate again if they resume their session later’ in the Authenticator options
  2. Uncheck - ‘Allow authenticating respondents to retake authenticated section’ & ‘Reload any previously saved progress upon authentication’
  3. From survey options switch off - ‘Allow respondents to finish later’

The second survey works very well after using the above setting, Department Heads are able to endorse several declarations. However, two department heads have reported difficulties to endorse the declarations.

  1. One dept head has entered the survey but then left it without endorsing the declaration.  When he tried to enter the survey again later on, he were informed that “You have either already completed the survey or your session has expired.”.  As a result, he cannot endorse that subordinate’s declaration. For your information, when other staff members submitted their declarations later one, he can endorse their declarations because he entered the survey and endorsed them right away. I wonder if it is because the option “Allow respondents to finish later” has been switched off. 
  1. Another department head has endorsed a declaration but his response cannot be captured. He cannot enter the survey again as it said “You have either already completed the survey or your session has expired.”.

Do you have any solutions to the two situations mentioned above? Thanks a lot for your help!

Hi,

I would recommend the following:

  1. Find out how much time passed between the respondents’ visits to their survey.
  2. Check your survey’s Data tab to see if there any incomplete responses recorded in the complete data.
  3. Check the survey Options circled in red in the screen shot below. If it’s set to Record, it might be the case that their responses were recorded because the respondent tried resume the survey after the time interval passed, making their survey link invalid. Similarly, if it’s set to Delete, and they tried accessing the survey after the time interval has passed, the survey link would also be invalid.

 

Hi, Matthew. Thanks for your reply. 

  1. The department heads accessed the link again a few days after the first click, not exceeding a week. 
  2. I don’t find any incomplete responses recorded in the complete data under the survey’s Data tab.
  3. In the survey option, “Record” is selected and “3 months” is set for the question “How much time should pass before they’re considered incomplete?”.  Therefore, I think the time is long enough and the link should not become invalid. 

How can I make the survey link valid again for those two department heads? May I have your advice again, please? 

 

OK, at least you have ruled out that possibility. Sorry, my experience with the authenticator feature is very limited, so I don’t have any other suggestions than to verify for sure that it is possible to resume the second survey after starting it.

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