Original publication date: June, 2007
In this month’s column, I’d like to discuss how the bid match delivery information (method, format, and e-mail address) is assigned when you create a profile or reactivate an inactive profile. Understanding these two different procedures from Softshare’s end of things will help you decide whether bid match delivery information should be edited before or after the profiling request is submitted.
When you create and submit a profile to Softshare, WebCATS sends bid match delivery information along with the new profile. This delivery information comes directly from the bid match settings in the client record. This means that you should always set your desired bid match delivery information for a client before creating the client’s profile.
You might think that, to remedy the situation, all you need to do is then go to the Bid Match Options area of the client record and update the delivery information that is in place for the client. And while this action will generate and deliver a change notification message to Softshare, Softshare’s system is not able to process change notification messages for inactive profiles. And since Softshare may still be setting up your new profile (i.e. it’s in the design phase and therefore inactive), there’s a chance that your bid match delivery change request will never be acted upon.
If you find that you have submitted a brand new profile whose results are intended for a delivery method, format, or e-mail address other than what was in place for the client at the time of profile creation, you should first determine whether or not the profile is active. You can determine this by looking for a confirmation e-mail from one of Softshare’s profiling specialists. If you’re in receipt of this confirmation e-mail, then you can simply go into the client record and make the delivery information update and our system will take care of it automatically for you. If you’re not yet in receipt of this confirmation e-mail, you should still make the update to the client record, but you should also e-mail profiles@softshare.com with the updated delivery information so that we can make sure it is part of the profile when it does become active.
Things work a bit differently when reactivating a profile. When you reactivate a profile, Softshare puts it into production exactly as it was before inactivation, including its bid match delivery settings. If you want to reactivate a profile and change its delivery settings (e.g. you’d like to upgrade from HTML e-mail delivery to mybidmatch.com Web delivery), you should activate the profile first and then update the delivery method and format for the profile.
If you update the delivery settings before reactivating the profile, your request will be ignored. That’s because, as I just mentioned, Softshare’s system cannot process change notification messages for inactive profiles.
We don’t expect you to get the sequence right every time. For this reason, you should always look for confirmation messages for every bid match delivery change you make in WebCATS. These confirmation messages are returned almost immediately, to the e-mail address that is designated for your Bid Match program. You can also check the copy of the profile that displays in the client record. This will typically display the new bid match delivery option the following day, two days at the latest.
If you don’t see a confirmation e-mail for a specific request or the profile never displays the new delivery information, it is a definite red flag and you should look into it.