Publish & Distribute

Notifications

About notifications

With the Notifications feature in QUESTIONSTAR, you can automatically send emails or call a web service as soon as a specific condition inside the questionnaire is met. This feature is especially useful when you want to respond to critical answers right away or trigger automated follow-up processes.

Typical scenarios from everyday business:

An existing customer leaves a poor rating → your service department is notified automatically by email so it can respond quickly.
A prospective new customer expresses interest in a product → their contact details are sent to your CRM system via web service.
A participant reports a technical problem → the IT team is notified and the participant receives an automatic confirmation.
An employee reports stress or dissatisfaction in an internal survey → the HR team is informed right away, without having to wait for the results.
A respondent asks to be contacted → a confirmation email is sent automatically.
A participant signs up for an event, webinar, or workshop → an automatic confirmation with the event details is sent.

Notifications let you act in real time — faster, more precisely, and without the detour through manual analysis.

Creating notifications

To create a notification, proceed as follows:

Go to the Distribute Survey section.
In the left-hand menu, click Notifications.
Click + Add Notification.
Give the notification a meaningful name (this name is used internally only and is never communicated externally).
Define the condition under which the notification should be triggered.
Enter the email address(es) the notification should be sent to.

Tip:
You can create as many notifications as you like to cover different conditions and response scenarios.

Defining conditions

A notification is triggered only when the conditions you define are met.

The following criteria are available for defining conditions:

Answers to individual questions — e.g., for certain values or answer options.
Survey completion — e.g., only for fully completed questionnaires.
Completion Date — e.g., for responses submitted within a certain period.
Information from the contact list — e.g., when the customer type is "especially important."
URL parameters — e.g., when a specific campaign parameter is passed.
Device Type — e.g., only for access via a smartphone.

Multiple conditions can be combined with AND / OR operators so that even complex scenarios are reliably captured.

Editing the email content

This lets you personalize your message and respond directly to the answers.

Click "Edit Email" to design the content of the notification. In this dialog you can:

Set the From Name. Most email programs show this name instead of the actual sender address.
Define the reply-to address (for any responses).
Adjust the subject line of the email.
Write the message text as you like.
If needed, insert variables — e.g., a link to the completed questionnaire or contact list values.
Save the text as a template.
Load an existing template.
Send a test email to check it.
Save the email notification.

Tip:
You can embed the respondent's answers directly into the email text. Read more in the help article "Using respondents' answers in the questionnaire".

Note:
The sender address ("From") cannot be changed. Custom email addresses often cause messages to land in the spam folder or to be blocked by the recipient's mail server. For sending, QUESTIONSTAR uses the certified address sender@questionstar.com, which is recognized by major email providers and meets the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) standard. This significantly increases the delivery rate and largely avoids being classified as spam.

It is still possible to send via your own mail server. This requires technical adjustments on both your side and ours. This service is subject to a fee. Contact us if you're interested.

Sending a notification to survey respondents

In some cases you'll want to send notifications directly to respondents — e.g.:

to confirm a sign-up for an event,
or to confirm receipt of a problem report.

For this, the questionnaire must contain a Text Input question of the type "E-Mail".

Once this requirement is met, in the "Send to" dropdown, select the relevant question as the source for the email address.

The notification is then sent automatically to the entered email address when the configured condition is met.

Note:
For opt-in confirmations, please use the Double Opt-In mechanism, which you can enable in the survey settings. This mechanism offers dedicated features that let you reliably meet the legal requirements of a double opt-in procedure.

Tip:
If you invited respondents via the QUESTIONSTAR mailer, please use the "Thank You Email" function in the mailer to send your thank-you. That way you don't need to capture any email addresses in the questionnaire.

Calling a web service

If you'd like to call a web service instead of sending emails — e.g., to automatically transfer data to a CRM system, a ticketing system, or another third-party system — select, in the "If this condition is met" (1) dropdown, the "Trigger a Web Service" (2) option, and click "Edit Web Service" (3).

There you can:

specify the target URL (Endpoint URL) of the web service,
select the desired HTTP method (GET or POST),
define parameters — with fixed or dynamic values from the questionnaire, contact list, or URL,
add more parameters
or remove ones you no longer need.
In the advanced settings, you decide whether answer options are passed as codes (e.g., "1", "2", "3") or as text values (e.g., "satisfied", "neutral").