Email, SMS, and how replies come back

What this covers

Once you've built a survey, Verinode still has to get it in front of a real person and turn whatever they send back into a usable number. This article is about that middle step: how a survey actually leaves Verinode (email, text, or both), what shows up in the recipient's inbox or phone, and, for a Lightning survey, exactly how a one-line reply gets read as a rating from 1 to 5. For how to build the survey itself, question by question, see building a survey and Lightning surveys and Quick Survey.

Verinode does not decide who gets asked or what a good score is. You pick the people and the channel; Verinode handles the sending, the parsing, and getting the answer back onto the record. A Lightning reply also flows into that vendor's or process's team-satisfaction average and, where relevant, into signal detection and the peer benchmark layer, always anonymized before it leaves your account.

Where to find it

Open Forms from the sidebar (it sits under My Data, alongside Vault and Connect) at /forms. The page opens on the Surveys tab (the other two are Audits and Reviews). Click the copper + Add Survey button in the header to open the New Survey modal. At the top of that modal is a two-way toggle: Lightning (1 question) and Full survey. Delivery method (Email, SMS, or Email + SMS) is a Lightning-only field. Full survey mode always sends by email, with a link the recipient clicks through to answer.

The three delivery methods

In Lightning mode, a row labeled Delivery shows three buttons: EMAIL, SMS, and Email + SMS. Whichever one is active is filled dark; the other two stay outlined.

• EMAIL. The invite goes out as a normal email. Only team members with an email address on file can be selected.
• SMS. The invite goes out as a text message. Only team members with a phone number on file can be selected.
• Email + SMS. Sends both, to whichever contact details each person has. A team member with only an email still gets the email; one with only a phone still gets the text.

Switching to SMS or Email + SMS unlocks two things further down the modal: an inline phone-number prompt next to any selectable team member missing one, and a Quick add team member box for adding someone new by name and phone number alone (no email required to reach them by text).

Getting everyone's contact details in place

Below the delivery buttons is the Invite Team Members checklist: one row per person, name, role, and whatever contact details are on file (email, phone, or both). Only rows with the contact detail the chosen method needs are selectable; the rest are dimmed and can't be checked. A Select all / Deselect all link above the list toggles every eligible row in one click.

Two ways to fix a gap without leaving the modal:

• Inline phone entry. If SMS or Email + SMS is selected and a team member has no phone, their row shows a small amber No phone label and, underneath it, a phone field and a Save button. Type the number and click Save (it shows an ellipsis while saving); the phone is written to that person's Team record immediately and their row becomes selectable.
• Quick add team member. A dashed-border box below the checklist, visible whenever SMS or Email + SMS is selected. It asks only for Name and a phone number (placeholder +1 555 123 4567). Click Add and the person is created on your team roster and auto-checked as a recipient of the survey you're building. If they don't have an email on file, a line appears under the roster reminding you: "Remember to add an email for [name] in the Team section so they can sign in."

If you're signed in with an email address, a dashed-border row above the checklist reads Include me ([your email]), with the note that you'll get the same email as everyone else. Checking it adds you to the send without taking a seat on the team roster, useful for testing the wording or setting an owner baseline alongside the team's answers.

If your roster is empty, the checklist reads: "No team members yet. Use quick add below."

What the invitee actually receives

Lightning by email. The message arrives from Verinode <surveys@verinode.ai> with the subject line "Rate [Subject] 1-5 for [Your Company]." The body carries your question and asks for a reply, nothing else. There is no link and no form to open, the entire message is built around getting a single digit back.

Lightning by SMS. A short text: "Quick question from [Your Name] via Verinode: [your question]," followed by "Reply 1-5 (1=low, 5=high)." It's written to stay inside a single SMS segment (160 characters) whenever the question is short enough.

Full survey by email. A different, longer flow: the subject line reads "Quick question: how well is [Subject] working for your team?" and the body links through to a survey page where the recipient answers each question and submits. That link-based flow is covered in building a survey; everything below this point is specific to the reply-by-number Lightning mechanic.

Either way, replying is the whole interaction. There's no dashboard for the recipient to log into and no account for them to create.

How a reply becomes a rating

When someone replies to a Lightning email or texts back, Verinode reads the message body looking for a single digit from 1 to 5. It works through the reply in this order:

1. 1Strip the signature and quoted text. Verinode scans the reply line by line and stops reading the moment it hits a signature marker (a line that's just "--", an email quote header like "On [date] wrote:," a "From:" or "Sent:" line from an Outlook quote, "Sent from my [phone]," "Get Outlook for..." or a row of dashes or underscores). Only what's written above that cutoff counts as the actual answer, and only the first five non-empty lines of it are considered.
2. 2Look for a line that's just a digit. If any of those lines is exactly "1," "2," "3," "4," or "5" with nothing else on it, that's the rating. This is the clean case: someone replies with just the number.
3. 3Look for a fraction like "4/5." If nothing matched yet, Verinode checks for a number-over-five pattern anywhere in those lines.
4. 4Look for natural language. Next it checks for the word "rate" followed later in the same line by a digit 1 to 5, catching replies like "I'd rate them a 4."
5. 5Fall back to the first standalone digit. As a last resort, Verinode looks at just the very first meaningful line and pulls out a lone digit 1 to 5, but only if that line doesn't also contain a run of 7 or more digits (so a phone number or account number typed near the top of a reply isn't mistaken for a rating).
6. 6If none of that matches, the reply is unparseable and nothing is recorded yet.

A reply of "4," "I'd say 4/5," "Honestly I'd rate them a 4, service has been solid," or just "4" with a signature block underneath, all resolve to the same rating: 4. A reply that opens with a phone number, an address, or no digit at all yields nothing, and the unparseable path below takes over.

What happens after a match

A parsed rating is written to that person's invite record the first time only. Each invite can be answered once: if a token has already recorded a response, a second reply to the same address doesn't overwrite it. The original reply text is kept alongside the parsed number, so you (or Verinode) can double-check what someone actually wrote if a rating ever looks surprising.

The moment a rating lands, two things happen automatically:

• The subject's team-satisfaction average updates immediately, no waiting for the survey to close.
• Verinode checks the new answer for signals worth a decision, a sharp dissatisfaction score or a gap against what the rest of the team is saying can surface in the Feed as something to act on. See acting on decisions for how those surface.

When Verinode can't read the reply

If a reply comes back with no digit Verinode can find, it doesn't just drop it. As long as the invite is on file and has an email address, Verinode sends one follow-up email, and only one per invite, with the subject "Could not read your rating. Please reply with 1-5." It repeats the original question and asks for a plain number back. If that person replies again and still doesn't include a readable digit, no second follow-up goes out, the reply is simply logged as unparseable.

An empty reply (a blank message, or one where every line is blank) is treated as no answer at all, it's logged and no follow-up is sent, since there's nothing in it to correct.

Guardrails against over-asking

Two protections run underneath every send, without any setting to configure:

• A per-recipient frequency window. Across all of your surveys, the same person won't get more than one survey invite email inside a rolling window of about two weeks. This matters most for recurring surveys, a quarterly tool check and a monthly vendor pulse landing in the same week for the same person is exactly what this prevents.
• Opt-outs are honored. If a recipient has previously unsubscribed from a Verinode-sent survey (using the one-click unsubscribe link that appears on external, non-team recipient surveys), that address is skipped on every future send, silently, with no error shown on your end.

Where results show up

Open a survey from the Forms page and its detail panel lists every invitee: name, a small SMS or E+SMS tag if they weren't emailed, and their email and phone underneath. Once someone responds, their row shows the parsed rating (e.g. "4/5") in copper next to a green Responded label. Anyone who hasn't answered yet shows a Resend link instead, click it to resend that person's invite; it flips to Resent once it goes out again.

The Results view for a Lightning survey lists everyone who's answered, sorted lowest rating first, each with their rating in large type (colored red at 2 or below, green at 4 or above), how long they took to reply, and a delivery tag if they weren't reached by email alone. Anyone still pending appears underneath, dimmed, labeled Awaiting. Above the list, the running average reads as a number out of 5. Below it, a Rating Distribution block breaks the same responses into five bars, one per star value from 5 down to 1, each showing how many people picked it. Before anyone has answered, the whole results view instead reads: "No responses yet. Results will appear here once team members start responding."

Best-practice example

You just switched water-mitigation vendors and want a two-week gut check from the crews actually using the new equipment. You build a Lightning survey, set delivery to Email + SMS since two of your site leads rarely check email in the field, and select just those leads rather than the whole team. One lead's phone isn't on file, so you add it inline and click Save before sending. Three replies come back: one lead texts "4," another emails "I'd rate them a 4, way better than the last vendor," and the third's email opens with a long forwarded thread and just the digit "5" typed above it. All three parse cleanly. A fourth lead replies "call me, this vendor's truck number is 8005551234," which Verinode correctly reads as unparseable rather than misreading the phone number as a rating, and gets a single follow-up asking for a plain 1 to 5.

Data sources