Controlling survey access and permissions is a fundamental operational safeguard. But when your organization is responsible for a large (and growing) number of surveys and users, how do you manage who has access to what, without getting lost in complexity?
How do you keep the crossovers between multiple clients, teams and user roles neatly organized as you balance collaboration and governance?
How do you maintain security around sensitive surveys, without sabotaging operational efficiency?
The environment challenge: to split or not to split?
When the numbers get big, market research organizations are faced with a dilemma about how to organize survey management.
Divide and conquer
Some market research companies opt for creating separate environments for different teams or clients. While this may seem logical, a split setup can also be the enemy of efficiency, resulting in:
- Duplicated administration.
- Fragmented workflows.
- Inconsistent processes.
- Higher operational costs.
One big happy family
Conversely, keeping everything within a single environment exposes a different set of over-visibility challenges, like:
- Users see surveys that don’t concern them.
- Survey lists become too large and difficult to navigate.
- Sensitive client projects require additional oversight.
- There’s a higher risk of accidental changes.
It’s clear that neither solution is optimal. What’s needed is a third way.
Crowd control
Nfield commonly supports multiple teams, departments and client accounts within a single domain. However, in response to the challenge described above, Nfield offers a different structure for managing access.
Nfield’s two-layered survey access management keeps everything in a single, centralized environment, where users can only see manage what is relevant to them. This is achieved via a combination of role-based permissions and Survey groups, which work together to deliver a neat solution to a complex ask. Here’s how it works.
1. Role-based permissions: what users can do
Every user is assigned a role that determines which actions they can perform. For example:
- Domain Administrator – full access across the domain.
- Power User – advanced operational capabilities.
- Regular User – day-to-day survey management.
- Sample Manager – focused on sample management activities.
- Quota Manager – responsible for quota administration.
This ensures each user can do everything they need to, and no more.
2. Survey groups: where users can act
Surveys are organized into groups, and individual users are assigned to those groups. This restricts users to only seeing surveys that are relevant to their projects, clients or teams.
For example:
- Client A surveys can be assigned to one group.
- Client B surveys can be assigned to another.
- Internal research projects (like employee satisfaction surveys) can have their own dedicated group.
Survey lists are kept clean and teams are not distracted by work they’re not involved with.
Easy to manage, easy to scale
Nfield’s two-layer approach to survey access is simple to manage and scales elegantly as volumes increase.
No matter how many (more) clients, surveys, projects or research personnel are in the picture, this enables control without sacrificing flexibility. Operational efficiency is preserved through maintaining a single environment, while sensitive surveys are hidden from prying eyes. Navigation is simplified for everyone, while administrators retain the governance required for enterprise-scale research operations.
How to set up Survey groups
To find out how Survey groups work, watch the Nfield Academy session where our product experts demonstrate how survey visibility and user rights can be managed within Nfield.
Watch the academy session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4imGrcfrN1w.
