Buyer questionnaires (post-purchase check-ins)

A buyer questionnaire is a short survey you build once, and Creatures automatically emails it to a buyer a set number of days after they pick up their animal. It is the after-the-sale companion to your pipeline: it closes the loop, tells you how the animal settled in, and can capture a testimonial you are allowed to share. You build and manage questionnaires from the Post-purchase questionnaires panel on your Buyer pipeline dashboard.

Building a questionnaire

• Sender: you or one of your organizations. The survey email is branded with that sender, so the buyer sees the sender's name and photo along with a friendly line like "[Sender] would love to hear how things are going." Pick the sender the buyer already knows.
• Days after pickup: how long after pickup is confirmed the survey is sent. Allowed values are 0 to 365 days, and the default is 7. This is the wait: 0 means the same day pickup is confirmed, 7 means a week later. Choose enough time that the animal has actually settled in before you ask.
• Name: the survey title the buyer sees, up to 120 characters. It defaults to "Post-purchase check-in."
• Questions: you can have 1 to 20 questions (the builder starts you with three rows). Each question has three parts:
• Prompt: the question text, up to 240 characters.
• Type: the kind of answer widget the buyer gets. The choices are Long text (a paragraph box), Short text (a one-line box, up to 240 characters), Rating (a 1 to 5 scale, shown to the buyer as "1 not great, 3 okay, 5 great"), and Yes or no (a Yes/No dropdown). Pick the type that fits the answer you want.
• Required: a checkbox for whether the buyer must answer that question before they can submit.
• Status: a questionnaire is either active or archived. Your "Active questionnaires" list shows each survey's sender, its delay, how many questions it has, and a count of how many responses have been submitted.

How it actually sends

This part is automatic, and it is worth knowing exactly how it works so you are not waiting for a "send" button that is not there.

When a sale invoice's pickup is confirmed, Creatures wraps the questionnaire in a one-step email series and enrolls the buyer in it. The survey email then goes out through the same email-series engine described in Automated buyer follow-up (email series), after the days-after-pickup wait you set. A few implications to keep in mind:

• You do not press send. It is tied to pickup confirmation and goes out on its own.
• It is not instant. Like all series email, it is delivered on the regular sending schedule (about every ten minutes), after the delay.
• You will see a system-managed series for it. The questionnaire's backing series appears in your Email series list as "Post-purchase questionnaire: [name]." That is expected. It is managed for you, so do not edit or delete it by hand.
• One check-in per sale. A buyer gets one questionnaire per paid sale invoice, so a repeat buyer who buys again gets a fresh survey for the new sale.

What the buyer sees

The buyer gets an email with a link to a simple web page (at a private survey link). They do not need a Creatures account to fill it out: it is a public, no-login page shown in the normal Creatures look. They answer the questions and submit once. After submitting, they see a "Thank you" confirmation and cannot edit their answers, because each link accepts one submission. Since it is a public link, treat it the way you would any survey link you share.

Public testimonial consent

The buyer's form includes a consent checkbox, "[Sender] may quote my feedback publicly," plus an optional short public note (up to 1200 characters).

• What consent means: you may quote a buyer publicly only when they tick that box. The optional note is the buyer's own words, written specifically to be shared.
• What it gives you: a clean, consented path to testimonials, in the buyer's voice, with their permission on record. If a quote is a good fit to share as a public review of the sale, you can point the buyer to Leaving a review.

Reading the results

Back on the pipeline, a buyer's responses appear under their sale (invoice) lead, in a "Questionnaire results" panel. (Questionnaire results are anchored to the paid sale invoice, so they show on the invoice-backed lead, and the "Questionnaires" and "Awaiting response" counters at the top of the pipeline count those same invoice-linked responses.) Each response carries a status, and the lifecycle is:

• Pending: the response has been created but the email has not gone out yet.
• Sent: the survey email has been sent to the buyer.
• Submitted: the buyer filled it in. Once submitted, you see every question with the buyer's answer, plus whether they consented to a public testimonial.

For the surrounding tools, see Your buyer pipeline for where these results live and Automated buyer follow-up (email series) for the engine that delivers the survey.

Related information

• Your buyer pipeline
• Automated buyer follow-up (email series)

Updated on: 23/06/2026