Follow-up sequences
A sequence chains one survey to another. When a response lands on a from-survey, a follow-up to-survey is automatically queued through a pipeline and sent to that respondent. This is how you keep a conversation going — recover an unhappy customer, invite a product review, or hand someone off for a personal follow-up — without anyone having to remember to do it.
Because the follow-up is triggered by the response itself, the timing is always relevant: people hear from you precisely because of what they just told you.
How a sequence fires
A sequence listens to its from-surveys and reacts the moment a response comes in:
A response arrives
Someone finishes one of the sequence's from-surveys.
Conditions are checked
If you've attached any conditions, every one must be true for that response (they're combined with AND). With no conditions, every response qualifies.
The pipeline delay runs
The follow-up waits the delay set on the pipeline — anything from immediate to a number of days, hours and minutes.
The follow-up is queued
The to-survey is queued through the pipeline and sent to the respondent. You can watch it land in the dispatch queue with a source of Sequence (or Recovery for recovery follow-ups).
The three types
Every sequence has a type that signals its purpose:
- Manual — a hand-built follow-up. You set it up to follow one survey with another, however you like.
- Recovery — recover the experience of an unhappy customer. The response feeds your Alerts flow so your team can step in directly, and a recovery follow-up survey is queued to the customer. You get both a human touch and an automated one.
- Product review — invite the respondent to leave a product review after their first response.
Recovery works hand in hand with Alerts
A Recovery sequence does double duty: the response feeds your Alerts centre so someone can follow up personally, while the recovery follow-up survey goes out automatically. For service recovery, pair it with on-site campaigns like Callback to catch unhappy customers in the moment as well as after.
Anatomy of a sequence
Four parts make up every sequence.
From-surveys
The surveys whose responses trigger the follow-up. A single sequence can be fed by several from-surveys — each one is configured on its own tab in the left-hand list of the editor, so you can switch between them and tune each independently.
To-survey
The single follow-up survey that gets queued. It's shared by every from-survey in the sequence.
Pipeline
The pipeline decides the channel (email, SMS or Viber) and the delay — how long after the response the follow-up is actually sent. The editor shows the channel and the delay so you can confirm both before saving.
Conditions
Optional rules on the response that decide whether the follow-up fires. Each condition reads one field — a question of the from-survey, or a piece of questionnaire or responder metadata — compares it with a criterion, and (for most criteria) checks it against a value.
All conditions must be true
Conditions are always combined with AND — the follow-up is queued only when every condition matches. Leave the conditions empty and the follow-up is queued for every response.
The available criteria include equal and not-equal, greater and less (with their -or-equal forms), contains and doesn't-contain, a regular-expression match, CSV contains / doesn't-contain, and the presence checks is empty and is not empty (which need no value).
Each from-survey keeps its own conditions
Because the from-surveys in a sequence are different surveys, each one keeps its own set of conditions. In the editor, pick a from-survey from the left-hand list and its full condition list appears on the right — edits there apply only to that from-survey. A small count next to each name shows how many conditions it carries.
Add one condition to every from-survey at once
When you want the same metadata condition on all of them — say, only follow up on orders from a particular country — use the Common metadata helper at the top of the editor. Pick a metadata field, a criterion and a value, then Add to all, and that one condition is appended to every from-survey in the sequence. Afterwards each from-survey's conditions remain independent, so you can still fine-tune them one by one.
The active toggle
A single Active switch turns the whole sequence on or off. It applies to every from-survey in the sequence at once, so you can pause or resume an entire chain in one click. A sequence counts as active only when all of its members are active.
How sequences are grouped
To keep the list tidy, sequences are grouped on the page:
- First by workspace — every sequence is shown under the workspace that owns its from-surveys.
- Then merged by destination — within a workspace, from-surveys that point at the same to-survey through the same pipeline (and share the same type) are merged into a single card and a single editor.
So a sequence card represents one shared follow-up — one to-survey, one pipeline — that can be fed by many from-surveys. You manage the shared target once and tune each from-survey's conditions separately. This same grouping is what the Overview dashboard counts when it shows your distinct sequences by type.