How recipients respond

What this covers

Every survey you send from Forms eventually lands in someone else's inbox or phone, not yours. This article is written from the recipient's side of that exchange: what the email or text looks like, what a full survey's link opens into, how a one-question Lightning survey gets answered without any link at all, and what happens if a reply cannot be understood or a recipient wants out. If you want the operator's view of the same survey, roster and results, resends, closing, exporting, read Inside a survey: roster, results, and actions instead. If you want the send-side of the one-question fast path, read Quick Survey.

There are two different recipient experiences depending on which kind of survey you sent:

• Full surveys (multiple questions, built from a template or from scratch) send a link. The recipient clicks it, answers on a page, and submits.
• Lightning surveys (the single rating question behind Quick Survey and the Forms Lightning option) send no link at all. The recipient just replies to the email, or texts back, with a number.

Both paths write to the same survey_invites and survey_responses rows underneath, so whichever one a recipient uses, the response shows up on the same Results tab described in Inside a survey.

Full surveys: the token-linked respond page

The email a recipient gets for a full survey carries a Give feedback button. The link underneath is verinode.ai/survey/respond?token=<their invite token>, a single-use token minted when the invite row was created. There is no sign-in: the token itself is the recipient's proof they were invited, so anyone who clicks it lands straight on the form.

The page reads the token, looks up the matching invite, and renders one of five states:

• Loading. A small spinning ring while the page resolves the token. This is normally instant.
• Invalid or missing token. "Link not found" with "This survey link is invalid or has expired." Shown if the token does not match any invite, or the link was opened without a token at all.
• Already responded. A checkmark, "Already submitted," and "You've already responded to this survey. Thank you!" Every invite token can only be used once; clicking a link a second time (or forwarding it to someone else) always lands here once the first response is in.
• Survey closed. "Survey closed" and "This survey is no longer accepting responses." Shown if the operator closed the survey after the invite went out but before the recipient answered.
• The form itself, if none of the above apply.

The form

At the top: the word Verinode in small uppercase, then the survey's title, then, if the survey has a subject, "About: [subject name]." If the recipient's name is on file, a personal line follows: "Hi [First name], takes about 2 minutes."

Below that, every question on the survey appears as its own numbered block, in order, with a red asterisk after the label if it is required:

• Rating questions show five round buttons, 1 through 5, that fill in copper when picked, with a "Poor … Excellent" caption underneath (or whatever custom scale labels the operator set when building the survey).
• Binary questions show a row of pill buttons, defaulting to Yes / No, or whatever custom options the question defines.
• Text questions show an open textarea with the placeholder "Type your answer…"

A Submit feedback button sits at the bottom. If any required question is left blank, clicking it shows "Please answer all required questions." and nothing is sent. While submitting, the button reads "Submitting…". A small "Powered by Verinode" line sits under the button the whole time, so the recipient knows this form is not the operator's own website.

After they submit

Most surveys show a plain thank-you screen: an emoji, "Thank you[, First name]!" and "Your feedback has been recorded and will help your team make better decisions."

One survey type is different. A Work Style (DISC) survey computes the recipient's own personality profile from their answers and shows it back to them immediately: "Here's your work-style profile[, First name]." with "There are no good or bad styles. This is just how you like to work." followed by their profile card. This is the one case where the respondent gets something back beyond a thank-you: their own result, not the aggregate the operator sees.

Once submitted, the token is spent. The invite row is stamped responded_at, and the recipient cannot use the same link again.

Lightning surveys: no link, just reply

A Lightning survey (the single-question format behind Quick Survey) sends no page for the recipient to open at all. The email or text already contains the question; the recipient answers it by replying, in place, with a number.

Replying by email

The Lightning invite email shows the question as a headline, then a boxed callout: "Reply to this email with a number:" followed by "1 2 3 4 5" in large copper type and "1 = very unsatisfied · 5 = very satisfied." The footer just says "Just hit reply and type a number. Takes 5 seconds."

The trick that makes this work: the email's reply-to address is not the operator's inbox, it is a tokenized address unique to that invite (survey+<token>@…). Hitting reply and sending routes the message to Verinode's inbound mail handler, which pulls the token back out of the address and matches it to the invite, no page, no login, no click.

Verinode reads the first few lines of new content in the reply (anything above a signature line, an "-- " delimiter, an em-dash divider, or quoted "On … wrote:" text is ignored) and looks for a rating in this order:

1. A line that is just a single digit, 1 through 5 (the clean case: someone typed "3" and nothing else).
2. A fraction like "3/5" anywhere in the first few lines.
3. Natural language containing the word "rate," like "I'd rate them a 4."
4. A standalone digit 1 through 5 in the first line of new content, as long as that line does not look like a phone number.

If none of those patterns match, and this is the first time this particular invite has bounced, Verinode sends one automatic follow-up: the subject "We couldn't read a rating from your reply," restating the question and the 1-to-5 prompt, with "no worries, just reply with a single number from 1 to 5." This bounce fires at most once per invite. If the recipient replies unparseably a second time, no further bounce goes out, so a confused or joking back-and-forth cannot turn into a loop of automated emails.

Replying by SMS

If the invite went out by text (or "Both"), the SMS reads: "Quick question from [sender] via Verinode: [question]" followed by "Reply 1-5 (1=low, 5=high)." Texting back is handled by a Twilio webhook that matches the reply to a survey purely by phone number: it looks up the most recent invite for that operator with that exact phone number, on file, that has not yet been answered.

The reply text is parsed the same way as email (a bare digit, an "N/5" fraction, or the first standalone digit that isn't part of a longer number), and Twilio texts back one of these confirmations depending on what happened:

• Rating understood: "Thanks! Your rating of [N] has been recorded."
• No number found: "Please reply with a number from 1 to 5."
• No pending survey for that phone number: "We couldn't find a pending survey for this number. If this is a mistake, contact your team lead."
• Already responded: "You've already responded to this survey. Thank you!"
• Unrecognizable phone format: "We couldn't process this number. Please contact your team lead."

Because the match is by phone number rather than a token in the message, only one Lightning survey per phone number can be open and unanswered at a time for a given operator; the webhook always picks the most recently sent one.

What happens the instant a response lands

Whichever path a recipient used, submitting triggers the same chain on the operator's side: the response is saved, the subject's team-satisfaction average recomputes immediately, the operator gets a notification ("[Name] responded to '[subject]'"), and, if the rating is a 2 or lower, a second heads-up notification flags it as a low rating worth a look. None of this is visible to the recipient; from where they sit, the exchange ends the moment they hit submit, reply, or text back. The operator-side detail, the roster, the rating distribution, the AI summary, lives in Inside a survey: roster, results, and actions.

Suppression: when a recipient wants out

Every survey email carries the machinery for a one-click unsubscribe under the hood (CASL / CAN-SPAM compliant, RFC 8058 List-Unsubscribe headers so Gmail and Outlook can surface their own native "Unsubscribe" affordance next to the sender). Clicking that link, or opening the unsubscribe page directly, takes a recipient to a plain confirmation page:

• Success: "You've been unsubscribed" and "You won't receive any more survey emails from Verinode on behalf of the businesses that requested your feedback."
• Failure (an invalid or expired unsubscribe link): "We couldn't unsubscribe you" with the specific reason.

The unsubscribe link encodes a signed hash of the recipient's email, never the raw address, so the link itself can't leak an email address if forwarded or logged. Once a recipient unsubscribes, their email hash goes on a permanent suppression list that every future survey send checks first, from any operator, not just the one whose survey they unsubscribed from. If that suppression check ever fails to read cleanly, Verinode treats the recipient as suppressed rather than risk sending them anything, an intentional fail-closed choice: the failure mode of a broken opt-out check is "send nothing," never "send anyway."

Privacy: what a recipient's answer contributes to

Rating answers about a vendor, tool, carrier, TPA, or process feed, anonymized, into Verinode's peer intelligence layer alongside every other operator's team ratings for that same entity. A recipient's name, their individual rating, and anything they wrote in an open-text answer never leave your account or get shown to anyone outside your team. What comes back out the other side, on your own benchmarks pages, is the aggregated peer pattern, never a re-identified answer, and Verinode never sells any of it to carriers.

Best-practice example

You send a Lightning survey to six team members asking how a new equipment vendor is performing, three by email, three by text (two of those three have both on file, so they get "Both"). Within an hour, four replies land clean: three plain digits ("4", "5", "3") and one "I'd say a 4 honestly." A fifth reply comes back as a long paragraph with the number buried at the end of a signature block, so it bounces once, gets the "reply with a single number" nudge, and the recipient replies again with a bare "2" a few minutes later, which parses fine. The sixth person never replies at all and shows up on the Forms detail panel as Awaiting. You end up with five ratings, one of them a 2, which triggers the low-rating notification and gives you a specific conversation to have before renewing that vendor relationship.

Data sources

Related reading

• Quick Survey: asking one question from any entity
• Inside a survey: roster, results, and actions
• Forms: surveys, audits, and reviews
• How benchmarks work
• The Feed
• Clients and carriers