CX- Types of Authentication for Surveys

When you conduct you research you don't want anonymous users to access your survey. This will get you bad data and you will spend a lot of time cleaning up the data. Almost 80% use cases would want you to keep the survey link private and not make it publicly accessible. You don't want some spammer to start giving you feedback either. That being said there will be use cases where you don't want to authenticate the users, for instance a survey embeded on your website without any tracking information would just be accessible to anyone who visits your website.

QuestionPro offers a wide range of of authentication models at different security levels. You can chose the one that suits you the best.

Individual Login: It provides individual credentials for each respondent. This is the first level security.
- Global Password Protect: You could set up a common password for all the respondents. In that way no one other than whom you sent the survey to can respond to the survey.
- Email / Password: Use the respondent email and associate a unique password for each respondent. For example: Email: [email protected] Password: ****
- Username / Password: You can set up a unique username and a password for each respondent. For example: Username: QP126 Password: ****
- Participant ID: You could set up a unique ID for each respondent . For example: It could be a employee ID: 12231
- Password (Email detected automatically): You can define unique passwords for each email address. The system will detect if the password matches the email address the respondent claims to be on the back end. For example: Password: **** [ system will detect that if the password matches [email protected]]
- Email Invites only: The system makes sure that the survey can be taken if there is an invite sent in the respondent’s inbox. No other way of taking the survey is permitted.
Third Party Social Networks: It involves respondent’s third party social network’s login credentials to verify authenticity of the respondent. This is second level security.
- Facebook custom App:
- Facebook Connect: You can validate your respondent to log onto their facebook account to take the survey. So once the system verifies that the respondent is legit, only then they can take the survey.
Encryptions: For high level security you can use Single sign on for permitting authorization to the respondent to take the survey. It includes development work.
- SAML (Single Sign-On): It is an XML-based open standard data format for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties, in particular, between an identity provider and a service provider
- HMAC- SHA1( Single Sign-On): Single sign-on (SSO) is a session and user authentication service that permits a user to use one set of login credentials (e.g., name and password) to access multiple applications. On the back end, SSO is helpful for logging user activities as well as monitoring user accounts.
- DES Encrypted Custom Variables: It involves encryption and decryption of custom variables so that it cannot be hacked. It is used for sensitive data.