Managing Duplicate Responses in the Answer Library

Overview

Admins and content owners need to keep their content current and free of duplicates. This will help the teams to have a quick access to the required content and would also help the management to have an accurate reporting on the content usage. No matter the size of your organization, clean, duplicate-free content is essential in delivering best-in-class RFx responses.

Responsive's Answer Library Duplicate Report allows you to easily identify duplicate questions and/or answers for any executed search. You can then work through the duplicate questions and answers to reduce duplicates in your Answer Library. 

 

Use Case: Removing duplicates to maintain the health and hygiene of your Answer Library content and ensure you are using the most up-to-date responses.

 

Generating Duplicate Report

Tip: First, work through your duplicate questions, and then work through your duplicate answers. Duplicate answers will likely include lots of yes/no questions that won’t actually need detailed comparison and review.

 

To isolate your duplicates, follow the steps below: 

1. From the Answer Library, click Menu from the top navigation bar.

2. Select Duplicate Report.

3. The Answer Library - Duplicate Report will be displayed as shown below:

4. To view the details, you can click on the question/count.

The details such as who added the duplicate question and when it was added will be displayed as shown below:

5. To view response details of the question, click on the question. A section as shown below will be displayed:

6. Clickicon to see question properties.

8. After confirming the response details can be combined and/or deleted, click on the down arrow to the right of the   to see the metadata associated with each response. This will help you determine which answer to keep if you want the most recent or most used answer to remain in the Answer Library.

9. To delete the duplicate question, you can select the checkbox associated with the question and click DELETE. A deletion confirmation pop-up will be displayed as shown below:

10. Click YES to confirm the duplicate deletion. The duplicate will be deleted and a success message will be displayed as shown below:

11. To compare the responses and merge the response, you can select the questions and click COMPARE & MERGE.

The Merge Content section will be displayed as shown below:

12. Select the primary question and click REVIEW. The page will be displayed as shown below:

13. You can select the primary question and click REVIEW to view details about the project.

Note: If a field is required on a question, the content cannot be merged until the field is completed. To complete the required field, click Review and fill out the field accordingly.

14. You can review the content, make any modifications and click MERGE. The questions will be merged and a success message as shown below will be displayed: 

Note: If there are any filters applied to the Answer Library, the Duplicate Report would only display the duplicates from the filtered contents.

 

While isolating duplicate content, you may encounter several scenarios including:

1. Both Question and Answer are Exact Duplicates
2. Same Question but Different Answers
3. Duplicate Questions Cannot use Alternate Answers 

Both Question and Answer are Exact Duplicates

1. Review each question and answer to confirm the question, tags, and responses are duplicates.
2. Click the down arrow adjacent to the delete icon to view the usage count for each item and retain the one with the highest count.
3. Delete the record with the lower usage count by selecting the check-box associated with that question and then clicking the delete icon.  

Tip: As the usage count is not additive when combining duplicates, you will not see an increase in the usage count when duplicates are combined.

Same Question but Different Answers

1. Review each question and answer to confirm the question, tags, and responses are duplicates.
2. Click each Answer to view the differences.
3. Use Responsive’s Alternate Question functionality to add multiple answers to the same questions.

Duplicate Questions Cannot use Alternate Answers

This occurs when you have multiple lines of business that provide different responses based on the product or solution proposed.

1. You can use tags to delineate between the answers so they are easily identifiable in the future.
2. Take this opportunity to have SMEs in your various lines of business provide specific answers to the question so you can leverage Alternation Responses.

After working through the duplicate questions, proceed to working through the duplicate answers. 

• Duplicate answers that cannot be combined: The most common scenario here is that multiple questions will have yes/no OR supported/partially supported/not supported answers. Responsive is designed to maintain these answers in your Answer Library so they can easily be used when responding to a project. Having this content in your Answer Library will help the Recommendation Engine suggest the matching responses.

Tip: These answers should not be combined as it would tie too many questions to a single yes/no answer. Leave these as individual Q&A pairs so that if functionality changes in the future, you will not need to decouple the questions that are impacted by any product enhancements.

• Duplicate answers that can be combined: Scroll to the bottom of the Duplicate Answer Report until you see questions that have duplicate narrative answers that appear two or three times. Click on these Q&A pairs to see if the records can be combined using the Alternate Answer functionality.