Recurring Surveys

1. How recurring surveys work

A recurring survey collects feedback from your selected audience on a fixed schedule. Each collection period is called a round.

For each round, Enquete.com opens the survey, sends personal invitations where applicable, follows up with scheduled reminders, closes the response window and calculates the results. Tracked questions allow you to compare scores across rounds.

Who is involved?

2. Create a recurring survey

Go to Dashboard → 360° feedback & Recurring surveys and select New recurring survey.

The setup wizard contains six steps. Each step is saved when you continue, so you can leave the wizard and return later.

Step 1: Choose your goal

Select a template or use an existing survey with your own questions.

• Team pulse (eNPS)
• Workload and stress
• Customer NPS
• Course evaluation
• 360^o feedback
• Use your own questions

Templates provide a suggested schedule and privacy level. You can change these during setup.

Complete the following details:

• Name: enter an internal name for the recurring survey.
• Language: choose English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese or Brazilian Portuguese. This sets the language of the survey's invitations and standard notices.
• Sender name: optionally enter a name for invitations. Recipients will see “your name via Enquete.com.” The sender address remains noreply@enquete.com.

Step 2: Select your survey and tracked questions

If you selected a template, choose between two options:

1. Click Create the survey to generate a survey from the template.
2. Select a survey you already have from the list.

If you selected Use your own questions, choose an existing survey from the list. Once a survey is created or selected, its questions will load. A new survey may take a few seconds to appear.

Select the questions you want to follow in the trend. Each tracked question receives a stable trend key so its results remain connected across rounds, including when its wording changes. Keep the meaning consistent to make comparisons useful.

• At least one question must be tracked.
• Tracking more than six questions displays a warning, because longer surveys can reduce participation.
• Questions used to control branching cannot be tracked.
• Other questions can change between rounds.

Step 3: Choose your audience

Choose how people will access each survey round. Select a contact group or linked list for personal email invitations, or choose an open link to distribute the survey yourself.

Unsubscribed contacts are automatically excluded from invitations in every round.

Step 4: Set the schedule

Configure when rounds open and how long respondents can answer.

• Rhythm: weekly, every two weeks, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, yearly or a custom interval in weeks, months or years. Monthly schedules also let you choose the week and day.
• Time and time zone: select the local sending time. The schedule follows the selected time zone through clock changes.
• First round: start at the next scheduled time, immediately after activation and then on schedule, or calculate the schedule from a selected date.
• End: continue indefinitely, stop after a selected number of rounds or stop on a chosen date.
• Response window: choose how many days each round remains open. It must close before the next round opens.
• Reminders: schedule up to three reminders for people who have not answered. Set each reminder relative to the opening or closing date.
• Periods without rounds: add holidays or other excluded periods. After adding a period, choose whether affected rounds move to the first working day afterward or are skipped.
• Never open a round in the weekend: enable this option if required.

Review the preview of the next six rounds. It shows opening dates, reminders and closing dates, including notes for moved or skipped rounds.

Step 5: Configure privacy and reporting

• Anonymity: select Anonymous, Confidential or By name. See Privacy and anonymity.
• Minimum group size: choose the minimum response count required to display group results in recurring reports, trends, alerts and their exports.
• Who receives the results: select team members and specify whether each receives an email summary. If you select nobody, results are assigned to you.
• Summary by email after every round: enable or disable summary emails.
• Compare results per group: select contact fields, such as Department or Location, for result breakdowns. Available fields come from the selected group's contacts.
• AI summaries: optionally enable AI-generated interpretations. This is off by default.
• Share results with respondents: optionally enable manual or automatic sharing. This is off by default.
• Keep responses for: specify a retention period in months. This value is currently stored but does not automatically delete responses.

Contact field values are captured when a round opens. Later changes to a contact's department or location do not change the breakdowns for previous rounds.

Important: once the recurring survey is running, privacy can only become stricter and the minimum group size cannot be reduced. Minimum group thresholds do not apply to every view of the underlying survey; see Privacy limitations.

Step 6: Review and activate

Review the first round, expected invitations per round and per year, and the remaining monthly invitation quota. The wizard lists any setup steps that still need attention.

Click Activate to start. If the first round is configured to begin immediately, you will be asked to confirm the number of invitations.

Edit a running recurring survey

Click Edit on its dashboard to reopen the setup wizard. Setup changes apply from the next round. An already open round retains its existing configuration.

3. Understand survey rounds

Rounds that require attention

Markers explain changes to individual rounds, such as being sent late, moved for a holiday or weekend, released manually, closed early, extended or sent after list confirmation.

4. Find and manage recurring surveys

The 360° feedback & Recurring surveys page lists your recurring surveys and 360° surveys.

Each entry shows:

• The name, survey type and audience.
• The status and any currently open round.
• The schedule.
• The next round date, or the resume date when paused.
• The latest response rate.

Use the All, Active, Paused, Draft, Ended and Blocked tabs, the survey type filter or the search box to find a survey. Available actions include opening a survey, continuing a draft, pausing, resuming, ending and deleting.

A red banner identifies surveys whose rounds were blocked by the invitation limit.

5. Use the survey dashboard

Open a recurring survey to view its dashboard. The header shows its status, privacy level and number of rounds, with actions including Trend, Alerts, Duplicate, Edit, Pause or Resume, and Resume and start a round now.

Resolve action banners

• Round was not sent: review the required and remaining invitations, then select Raise limit, Try again now or Skip this round.
• Round waits for your confirmation: compare the current and previous list sizes, then select The list is right, send or Skip this round.

Monitor the current round

Key figures show the current round and closing date, the next round, and invitations used this month.

For invited audiences, a live funnel shows invited, sent, opened, clicked and completed counts. Additional counts identify unsubscribed contacts, delivery failures and invitations still waiting to be sent. For an open-link audience, the dashboard shows response totals instead.

Manage an open round

• Send reminder now: remind people who have not answered. This is unavailable within 24 hours of the previous reminder.
• Extend: add days to the current response window.
• Close now: close the round early and cancel its remaining scheduled reminders.

Review previous rounds

The rounds table shows each round's status, dates, invitation count, responses, markers and report link. When respondent result sharing is enabled, it also shows sharing status and the Share with respondents and Copy link buttons.

6. Read reports and trends

Open a round report

Select a report from the dashboard's rounds table. A round report includes:

• Invitations, responses and response rate.
• Question scores, such as an average or NPS for a recommendation question, with margins of error and answer counts.
• A badge identifying questions tracked in the trend.
• Segment breakdowns, such as scores by department. Groups below the minimum response count are marked as hidden.
• Written answers grouped by open question, presented in random order without respondent names or dates.
• A CSV export.

View the trend

Click Trend on the dashboard. Trends become available after the second round.

• Each tracked question has a line chart showing its score over time, with a margin-of-error band.
• The latest result shows its score, margin of error, answer count and change since the previous round.
• Changes are labelled as inside or outside the margin of error. A change inside the margin may reflect chance.
• Select a segment to compare lines for its values, such as individual departments.
• Export trend results to CSV.

7. Share results with respondents

Enable Share results with respondents in the wizard's Privacy and reporting step. Respondents can then open a limited results page without signing in.

What respondents can see

• Overall scores per question.
• Whether scores increased or decreased since the previous round.
• A small trend line for tracked questions.
• Invitation and response counts.
• Your optional message when sharing manually.

The page excludes written answers, segment breakdowns, alerts, AI summaries and respondent identities. Below the minimum group size, it displays only a message explaining that there are too few responses.

Choose how to share

Automatic sharing also sends disappointing results immediately. Choose manual sharing if you want to review the findings and add context before respondents receive them.

Who receives the results email?

Everyone who received an invitation for that round receives the results email, including people who did not answer. Unsubscribed contacts are excluded.

For an open-link audience, no results emails are sent because there were no personal invitations. Use Copy link to distribute the results page yourself.

Sharing limits and access

• Results emails count against the monthly invitation quota. If there is insufficient quota for everyone, no results emails are sent. The dashboard shows the shortfall so you can try again.
• The results page is already available through its link even if the email batch cannot be sent.
• Sharing cannot be withdrawn for one round, and the message cannot be edited after sharing.
• Disabling result sharing in setup makes all rounds' shared pages unavailable.
• Anyone with the link can open the page. Links can be forwarded.

8. Set up alerts

Click Alerts on the dashboard to create rules that are checked when a round's results become available. Each matching alert sends at most one email per round to its selected recipients.

You can test an alert against the last round, enable or disable it, edit it or remove it.

Alert history explains each outcome: triggered, threshold not reached, change within the margin of error, no earlier round for comparison, no result or group too small to display.

9. Understand emails and notifications

Standard emails use the recurring survey's language. Invitations use your configured sender name and the fixed noreply@enquete.com address. AI summary text can use each recipient's preferred language.

Unsubscribed contacts receive no invitations, reminders or shared results emails.

Actions that do not send a separate owner email

• A round opens or closes normally.
• The owner manually skips, closes or extends a round.
• Shared results emails cannot fit within the quota. This is reported on the dashboard.

Respondents receive no results emails unless Share results with respondents is enabled.

10. Privacy and anonymity

Your selected level is communicated to respondents. Once running, the survey's privacy can only become stricter and its minimum group size cannot be lowered.

Storage protections for Anonymous and Confidential surveys

• Answers, response dates and time taken to answer are retained.
• Exact response start and completion times are not retained.
• The device fingerprint is replaced with a one-way code that supports duplicate prevention within a round without retaining the original fingerprint.
• Invitation opening, clicking and answering retain dates rather than exact times.
• An invited person's participation status is retained so reminders can stop.
• The respondent's IP address and browser are not retained with the invitation when answering.

By-name surveys retain information as regular non-anonymous surveys do. Storage protections apply to new responses; earlier responses retain the details recorded when they were collected.

Individual response access

For Anonymous and Confidential recurring surveys, the underlying survey's respondent list, individual response pages and raw Excel or SPSS exports are blocked. Use the recurring round reports and trend pages to read results.

Privacy limitations

Minimum group sizes apply to recurring reports, trends, alerts and their exports. They do not apply to the underlying survey's standard charts, written-answer views or summary exports in Word, PowerPoint, CSV or PDF.

Response integrations connected to the underlying survey also continue receiving individual answer sets as they arrive. Anonymous and Confidential deliveries leave invitation references, email addresses and device fingerprints empty, but delivery timing and answer content can still provide identifying clues.

Written answers can contain names or recognisable details. Ask respondents to avoid identifying themselves or others when anonymity matters.

Regular anonymous surveys

Regular surveys outside this feature receive the same storage protections when Anonymous survey is enabled in the question builder settings. Their respondent lists and raw exports remain available.

11. Monthly invitation quota

• Each personal invitation counts against your monthly plan limit.
• Reminders do not count.
• Excluded unsubscribed contacts do not count.
• Shared results emails also count, one email per eligible recipient.
• The quota renews at the start of the month.

The review step and dashboard show how many invitations a round requires and how many remain.

If the quota cannot cover a round, the entire invitation batch is held back. The owner receives an action email and a banner appears. Use Raise limit, Try again now or Skip this round on the dashboard.

Shared results emails follow the same all-or-none rule. When there is insufficient quota, check the dashboard and retry after resolving the shortfall.

12. Pause, resume, end or duplicate a survey

When duplicating, select Continue the trend if you want the new survey's trend to begin with the original survey's rounds. This includes earlier rounds in the trend rather than copying their responses into the new survey.

13. Connect other systems

Maintain a linked audience

Use Zapier, Make or the API to send the complete audience list before each round. Empty lists are refused. If the list grows or shrinks by more than 25% compared with the previous round, sending waits for your confirmation.

Start workflows from recurring survey events

These events can start workflows in other systems, such as posting an alert in Slack or Teams. Separate response integrations on the underlying survey remain active and require their own privacy review.

14. Use AI summaries

AI summaries provide an initial interpretation of scores, trends and written feedback. Enable AI summaries in the wizard's Privacy and reporting step. They are off by default and can be switched on or off at any time.

Where summaries appear

Generate and regenerate a summary

On a report or trend page, click Write summary to generate the text in your language. The first person requesting that language generates the saved version. Email summaries are generated when the round's results become available.

Summaries are stored separately for each language and reused on later visits. Click Write again to generate a replacement in your language.

Language

Logged-in users receive summary text in their profile's preferred language, or English if none is set. This is independent of the survey's language.

Information sent to the AI provider

Enquete.com sends the figures and written answers available in the relevant report to its AI provider. Results suppressed by the minimum group size are excluded, and respondent names are not supplied as identity fields.

Names and identifying details entered inside written answers can still be included. Consider this when enabling AI processing and explaining it to respondents.

Enquete.com calculates the figures. The AI writes the interpretation and is instructed not to invent numbers, names or causes. Suggested explanations describe possibilities: the AI cannot establish why a score changed.

Use summaries alongside the report

Each summary is labelled AI summary and dated. Check its interpretation against the underlying results before taking action.

Suggested actions are text recommendations. Enquete.com does not track whether you completed them or evaluate their effect in later rounds.

15. Current limitations

• Retention is not automated. The Keep responses for setting stores a period but does not delete responses after it expires.
• Individual shared rounds cannot be withdrawn. Disable respondent result sharing to make all shared pages unavailable. A shared message cannot be edited afterward.
• Open-link audiences have no personal reminders or tracking. There are no personal invitations to track. The dashboard shows response counts rather than an invitation funnel.
• The sender address is fixed. You can customise the sender name only.
• AI recommendations have no action tracking. They cannot be marked complete or automatically followed up in later invitations.
• Alerts do not have separate AI interpretations. Alert emails include the round summary, and the alerts page does not display AI text.
• Underlying analytics do not enforce group thresholds. Standard charts, written answers and summary exports remain available without minimum-group-size protection.
• Response integrations continue delivering individual answers. Anonymous and Confidential deliveries omit identity fields, but retain answer sets and arrive at response time.
• Earlier response data is not cleaned up automatically. Responses collected before the storage protections were introduced retain their original timestamps and device fingerprints.