Creating User Accounts

July 28, 2020

The Teams and Roles menu provides tools for managing the human resources responsible for data collection:

  • The following accounts may be created by the users in the role Headquarters or Administrator:

    • interviewer and
    • supervisor accounts.
  • The following accounts may be created by the users in the role Administrator only:

    • headquarters,
    • observers, and
    • API accounts.

Note:

The Teams and Roles menu also provides access to the batch user upload feature, where up to 10,000 user accounts can be created from a single tab-delimited file. To learn more about batch user upload, please refer to this article.

Creating accounts

To add a supervisor, we select Teams and roles in the main menu, then Supervisors, and then click the Add supervisor button. For a new account of a supervisor role we need to fill out the following form (the full name, contact email and phone number fields are optional):

Administrators can similarly create headquarters, observer and API accounts filling out exactly the same forms.

Survey Solutions does not utilize the contact information (specified in the full name, contact email and phone number fields) to make automatic notifications or robocalls. Instead this information is stored for convenience of the survey managers (HQ and team supervisors) if they need to reach, for example, a particular interviewer.

When creating interviewer accounts, one must additionally specify to which team the interviewer is assigned by selecting the appropriate supervisor’s name. Correspondingly, to create a team, first create the supervisor, then the interviewers of the team, not other way around.

Attention:

An account can not be renamed. If you make a typo in the account name, you will need to create another one.

Note:

Interviewer accounts may not be created by supervisors, but may be edited by their supervisors, see the next section.

Editing accounts.

To modify the details of an existing supervisor account, click on the account’s username listed in the Name column of the corresponding list (interviewers, supervisors, headquarters, etc). This will take you to the user’s profile where you can:

  • change the password for the account, or
  • lock access to the account, or
  • update the name/email/phone associated with an account.

Note:

Interviewers may be transferred from one team to another by a Headquarters or an administrator user. This operation is not done in the interviewer’s profile, but on the list of interviewers.

Note:

Interviewers may update their contact information if permitted by the server administrator, see user profile settings in admin settings.

Note on passwords:

  • Interviewers may never change their own password. They must rely on their superiors to assist with this matter.

  • Supervisors may change passwords of interviewers of their team (without the need to know the original password) and can change their own password (must enter old password).

  • Headquarters users may change the password of any of the supervisors or interviewers (without the need to know the original password) and can change their own password (must enter their old password).

  • Administrator may change any password (without knowing the original one) except of his own (without which he can’t even login).

In addition to password protection, since version 20.05 of Survey Solutions, any user may set up a 2-factor authentication for using the server accounts.

See also password best practices