Building a full survey

What a full survey is

A survey in Verinode is a set of questions you send to your own team about a vendor, tool, process, supply, carrier, or TPA program, or straight to the team about themselves. It is one of two ways to run a pulse check. The other, Lightning, fires a single one-to-five question by text or email with no link and no form. A full survey is the multi-question version: pick a template (or build your own questions), name the subject, choose who answers, and send. Verinode reads the responses, deduplicates them into one composite per person per subject so a chatty respondent cannot skew the read, and folds the anonymized result into the peer benchmark layer alongside every other operator's contribution. Verinode never sells this data to carriers, and nothing here decides anything for you: you read the responses and act, or not.

Where to find it

Open Forms from the sidebar, under the My Data group (/forms). Older links to /surveys redirect here automatically. Forms has three tabs: Surveys, Audits, Reviews. This article covers the Surveys tab, the recipient-facing feedback flow. Audits and Reviews use the same question-builder machinery but run as operator-led self-checks, not something you send out.

On the Surveys tab, click + Add Survey in the header. This opens the New Survey modal.

The mode toggle

At the top of the modal are two buttons: Lightning (1 question) and Full survey. Lightning is the default for a fresh survey started from the header button, it feels like the lighter first step. Full survey is what this article covers, and it becomes the default automatically when the modal is launched from a decision plan's structured survey (see the section below on plan-prefilled surveys). Switching modes swaps the entire form below the toggle; nothing you typed in one mode carries into the other.

1. Choosing a template

The Template field shows a 2-column grid of cards, one per template, each with a bold label and a one-line description. Clicking a card selects it (highlighted with a copper border), resets the Title and Subject fields, and reloads the Questions list to that template's default question set, discarding any question edits you had made. The templates available:

| Template | What it's for | Subject asked for | |---|---|---| | Vendor Assessment | Delivery, quality, and value from a specific vendor | Vendor | | Tool Feedback | How the team feels about a software tool day to day | Tool | | Process Review | How well an internal process is working | Process | | Supply Feedback | Quality and consistency of supplies from a vendor | Supplier | | Carrier Assessment | How a carrier treats your business: payment speed, approvals, communication | Carrier | | TPA Program Review | Your experience with a TPA / managed repair program | TPA Program | | Team Tool Stack, first-day rating | Sent automatically when a teammate accepts their invite, so they rate every tool on their assigned stack from day one | none (self-targeted) | | Team Satisfaction (1-click) | A lightweight check-in on one teammate: workload, fit, flight risk | Team member | | Team Satisfaction (sent to the team) | Sent directly to teammates to rate their own satisfaction, workload, and likelihood to stay | none (goes to the whole team) |

The first template in the grid is selected by default when you open a fresh modal. If you arrive with a specific subject already picked (for example, from a vendor's detail page), that template and subject are preselected for you instead.

2. Picking the subject

Templates marked needs a subject (everything except the two team-wide templates) show a Subject field labeled with the template's own noun: Vendor, Tool, Process, Supplier, Carrier, TPA Program, or Team member.

For Vendor, Tool, and Supply templates, the field is a dropdown listing your vendor relationships by name, with a placeholder reading "Select vendor…" (or tool, or supplier). Choosing one auto-fills the Survey Title as {Template label}, {Vendor name} (for example, "Vendor Assessment, Acme Supplies") and links the survey to that specific vendor relationship, which is what lets the response roll up onto that vendor's satisfaction score.

For Process, Carrier, and TPA templates, it is a free-text field instead (there is no picklist of carriers or processes here), placeholder "e.g. Job intake process." Typing a name still auto-fills the title the same way.

If a subject-requiring template has no subject selected, Verinode blocks the send with "Please select a {subject label}." in lowercase (for example, "Please select a vendor.").

3. Survey title

The Survey Title field is a free-text input, placeholder "e.g. Vendor Assessment, Acme Supplies". It auto-fills the moment you pick a subject, but you can edit it freely afterward, useful if you want a more specific title like "Q3 Vendor Assessment" or a note about why you're running it. A blank title blocks the send with "Survey title is required."

4. Building the questions

Below the title sits the Questions editor, labeled Questions (from template) until you touch anything, then Questions (customized) once you do. Every question from the chosen template loads as an editable row, numbered 1 through however many questions the template ships with (5 to 8, depending on template). Each row has:

• A question label text field, editable inline.
• A type dropdown: Rating 1–5, Yes / No / Maybe, or Open text. (Binary questions can carry their own custom option set under the hood, for example Carrier Assessment's "Yes / No / Depends," but the dropdown itself only offers the three generic labels above.)
• A Required checkbox.
• A Remove link that deletes the question from the list.

Editing any label, type, or required flag, or removing a question, flips the header to "(customized)" and reveals a Reset to template link beside it, in copper, that discards your edits and restores the original template question set.

Below the question list, a dashed + Add question button appends a brand-new blank row (defaulting to Open text, not required) with its own generated id, so you can bolt on a follow-up the template didn't anticipate. Nothing stops you from adding more than one, or from deleting every template question down to just your own custom ones, the editor has no minimum question count.

5. Recurring the survey

Below the questions is Run on a schedule, a checkbox. Unchecked (the default), the survey is a one-shot. Checking it reveals a row of cadence buttons: Weekly, Every 2 weeks, Monthly, Quarterly, Every 6 months, Annually. Quarterly is selected the instant you check the box; pick a different cadence if you want. The helper text under the checkbox reads: "We'll re-send to the same group on the cadence you pick. Pause anytime from the survey detail panel."

Turning this on freezes the invitee list you build below as the recurring cohort. A cron job re-fires the survey to that same group on schedule; you can pause or resume the series later from the survey's detail panel in Forms, and resuming picks up at the next scheduled date rather than firing every date you missed while paused.

6. Inviting team members

The Invite Team Members section lists every team member Verinode already knows about, each row showing their name, role, and email and/or phone (whichever is on file), with a checkbox to select them. A Select all link (which becomes Deselect all once everyone eligible is checked) toggles every selectable row at once; it only appears once at least one member is eligible to select. In full-survey mode, a member is eligible only if they have an email address on file, members without one show a disabled, greyed-out checkbox.

Include me. If Verinode can read your own signed-in email, a dashed-border row appears above the member list: "Include me ({your email})" with a checkbox. Checking it adds your own email to the invite list (unless it's already there), described as: "You'll get the same email as everyone else, answer alongside the team to test the wording or set the owner baseline." This is how you see exactly what your team sees, and it lets Verinode compute an owner-vs-team gap on the same subject.

Empty state. If you have no team members on file yet, the list is replaced by: "No team members yet. Use quick add below." (Quick add is a Lightning-mode-only feature for SMS delivery; in full-survey mode with zero team members, add people from the Team section first, then reopen this modal.)

7. Send, or save as draft

The footer has two buttons: Save as draft (outlined) and Send to {count} (solid copper), where {count} is the number of team members currently checked, or an em dash if none are selected yet.

• Send to {count} requires at least one selected team member with an email on file; otherwise it blocks with "Select at least one team member with an email address." On success, Verinode fires an invite email to each selected person immediately and shows a confirmation reading "Survey sent to N recipient" (or "recipients" for more than one).
• Save as draft skips the send, no emails go out, and the survey sits in Forms with Draft status until you come back and send it (or add more invitees) later. The confirmation reads "Survey saved as draft," or "Survey scheduled" if you also turned on recurrence, since the parent series is now armed to fire on its cadence even though nothing has gone out yet.

Every invite email links to a one-time response page (/survey/respond) built from a token unique to that person; each recipient answers once. A resend option and an "add invitee after the fact" flow live on the survey's detail panel once it exists, covered by The Decision Workspace and the Forms detail view, not this create modal.

How a decision-plan survey pre-fills this modal

Some of Verinode's decision plans, most commonly a process-adoption plan recommending you roll out a new SOP or standard, ship a Send survey button on one of the plan's template artifacts. Clicking it does not drop a text blob into your clipboard the way the plan's other artifacts (kickoff emails, scorecard memos) do. Instead it opens this same Create Survey modal, already in Full survey mode, with:

• The Survey Title pre-filled from the plan (for example, "{SOP name} readiness, {standard}").
• The Questions list pre-filled with the plan's own question set, already editable and removable exactly like a template's questions, Verinode materializes them into the same question rows described above, defaulting any question without an explicit type to Open text and any question without a stated requirement to optional.
• The template picker set to whichever template the plan specifies (commonly Process Review), so if you want to start over from a template's stock questions instead, the Reset to template link is right there.
• No vendor pre-selected, since a process-adoption readiness survey targets your team's opinion of the process, not a specific vendor relationship.

From there, everything in this article applies unchanged: pick recipients, decide send now versus draft, optionally set a cadence, and send. This is how Verinode turns "here's a recommended next step" into a real, trackable pii.surveys row and a set of live invites, instead of a plan you'd have to build yourself from scratch.

What happens after you send

Each response feeds three things at once: the vendor or subject's team-satisfaction figure (recomputed live, not on a nightly job), your own low-rating notifications when someone answers the headline question 2 or lower, and, once you have enough of your own team's responses on a subject to form a single fair composite, an anonymized contribution to the intelligence layer that helps build the peer benchmark other operators see. You never see another operator's raw answers, and no operator, including you, ever gets a benchmark contribution large enough to be personally identifiable. See How benchmarks work for how these composites turn into a peer number, and Reading a benchmark for how to interpret what comes back.

Related

• Understanding your margin
• Benchmarks overview
• How benchmarks work
• Reading a benchmark
• The decision workspace
• Acting on decisions
• Clients and carriers
• Forwarding documents
• Connecting your data

Data sources