Quick Survey: asking one question from any entity

What Quick Survey is

Quick Survey is the one-question fast path for pulling a read from your team without building a survey. It lives as a Quick Survey button in the hero actions of an entity's detail page, vendor, tool, certification, and process pages today, with the same modal built to cover carriers and TPAs. Click it, and Verinode already knows what you're asking about, because it read that off the page you clicked from. You get one editable question, a three-way audience picker, a delivery method, and a single send button. No template picker, no subject picker, no multi-question builder.

Under the hood this is what the product calls a lightning survey, a single rating question (1 to 5) sent to your team, as distinct from a full survey, the multi-question builder still available from the Templates tab on the main Forms page for the less common case where you want several questions in one form. Quick Survey is built for the 95% case: you want to know, fast, what the team thinks about this one vendor, tool, cert, or process, right now. See The Feed for how survey responses feed into the signals Verinode surfaces elsewhere on the platform.

Where to find it

• Launch point: the Quick Survey button in the hero actions of a vendor, tool, certification, or process detail page. It's a copper-filled primary button with a speech-bubble icon, sitting alongside the other main actions for that entity.
• Where it lands: every Quick Survey you send shows up as a row in the survey list on Forms, at /forms. It carries an amber Lightning badge next to its title so you can tell it apart from full surveys at a glance, and the row's subtitle shows your actual question text instead of a subject name.

You never have to go to /forms to start one. The whole point of Quick Survey is that you start it from wherever you already are, looking at the vendor, tool, cert, or process you have a question about.

The subject is inferred, not chosen

Older survey flows opened with a subject-type picker: pick vendor or tool or process, then pick which one. Quick Survey skips that entirely. The entity you clicked from becomes the subject automatically, its ID and name are passed straight into the modal, and the question is pre-written around it. There is no subject dropdown anywhere in this modal.

A small label at the top of the modal confirms which entity you're about to ask about, formatted as About · [Entity name], so you can double check before you send.

The pre-filled question

Verinode drafts an opening question based on what kind of entity you launched from. You can edit it, or replace it outright, before sending:

• Vendor or tool: "How is [Entity name] working out for the team?"
• Carrier or TPA: "How is the team finding work with [Entity name]?"
• Certification: "Was the [Entity name] training worth the time and cost?"
• Process: "How is the [Entity name] process working in practice?"
• Anything else: "What does the team think about [Entity name]?"

The question sits in an auto-focused text box so you can start typing immediately. Below it, a caption spells out how the reply works: "Team members reply with a number 1–5. No link, no form. ⌘+Enter to send." That's literal: there's no survey page for the recipient to click into. Email invitations go out with a tokenized reply-to address, so a recipient just replies to the email with a number and it's captured automatically. SMS invitations ask the recipient to text back 1 through 5. Either way, the whole exchange is one message out and one number back.

Choosing who gets it: Send to

Three chips control the audience, no dropdown, no multi-select list unless you ask for one:

• Everyone: every team member on file gets the question.
• Leads: only team members whose role contains the word "lead," "manager," "supervisor," or "owner" (case-insensitive match against each person's role field). Useful when you want a foreman's read on a vendor rather than the whole crew's.
• Pick…: expands a scrollable list of every team member, each with a checkbox, their role, and their email and phone if on file. Click a name to toggle them in or out. If you have no team members added yet, this list reads "No team members yet."

Whichever chip you pick, the Send to N people button at the bottom recalculates live to match.

Choosing delivery: Deliver via

This row only appears if at least one recipient in your current audience has a phone number on file. If nobody does, Verinode assumes email and skips showing the choice at all, there's nothing to switch to.

When it does appear, three options:

• Email: the question goes out by email only. This is the default.
• SMS: text message only, to whoever has a phone number.
• Both: sends both an email and a text to anyone who has both on file.

The reachable count, the number that drives the send button's label, is a count that changes with your delivery choice. Pick Email and only people with an email address on file count. Pick SMS and only people with a phone number count. Pick Both and anyone with either counts. This is why the audience and delivery choices interact: picking "Everyone" doesn't guarantee everyone actually gets the message, only the reachable subset does, and that subset is what you're sending to.

Sending it

The footer has two buttons: Cancel, which closes the modal without sending, and a primary button that reads Send to N person or Send to N people, matching however many reachable recipients your current audience and delivery settings resolve to.

The send button is disabled in two cases:

• No question typed. An empty question can't go out.
• Zero reachable recipients. If your audience has nobody with the contact info your delivery method needs, there's nothing to send to.

Trying to send in either state (for instance, via the keyboard shortcut) shows an inline error: "Question is required." or "No reachable team members in the current audience."

Once you click send, the button reads Sending… while the invites go out. On success, a confirmation toast reads "Survey sent to N person" or "Survey sent to N people," and the modal closes.

Sending a Quick Survey doesn't consume Intelligence Units. The one place IUs come into a survey's life is if you later ask Verinode to generate an AI summary of the responses on a full, multi-question survey, that's a separate, opt-in action from the survey detail panel, not part of sending the question itself.

What happens after you send

Open the survey's row on Forms (it will carry the amber Lightning badge) to see responses land. Each response shows the responding team member's name, their 1-to-5 rating, how they were reached (an "E+SMS" or "SMS" tag appears next to their name if they weren't reached by email alone), and how long they took to reply. A running average out of 5 sits at the top of the results, and a five-bar rating distribution (5 down to 1) shows the full spread once responses start coming in. Until anyone replies, the panel reads "No responses yet. Results will appear here once team members start responding."

If a teammate rates something 2 or lower, Verinode raises it as a heads-up notification so a weak signal doesn't just sit unopened in a list you have to remember to check.

Responses to Quick Survey questions about vendors, tools, carriers, TPAs, and processes also flow, anonymized, into the peer intelligence layer behind how benchmarks work. Verinode never sells this data to carriers, and it never attributes a rating back to your business when it contributes to a peer number.

Empty states, in full

• No team members added yet (in the "Pick…" audience list): "No team members yet."
• No question typed: "Question is required." (inline error, blocks sending)
• No reachable recipients for the current audience + delivery combination: "No reachable team members in the current audience." (inline error, blocks sending)
• No responses yet on the results panel: "Results will appear here once team members start responding."

Best-practice example

You're on a vendor's detail page and want a gut check before renewing a contract. Click Quick Survey. The question is already drafted: "How is Acme Restoration Supply working out for the team?" You tighten it to ask about delivery times specifically, leave the audience on Everyone, and notice the Deliver via row appeared because two of your crew have phone numbers on file. You pick Both so nobody misses it whether they check email or texts. The button now reads Send to 6 people. You hit Cmd+Enter. A minute later replies start arriving as plain text messages and email replies, no link clicked, no form filled. By the next morning you have a 4.2/5 average and one 2/5 from your site lead, exactly the outlier worth a follow-up conversation before you commit to another year.

Related reading

• Understanding your margin
• Benchmarks overview
• How benchmarks work
• The decision workspace
• The Feed
• Clients and carriers