Mandatory questions

Mandatory questions are ones that the respondent must answer before the survey can be considered "complete". Once a conversation is complete, text analytics and alert processing can be performed on the responses. If a respondent abandons the conversation before the mandatory questions are answered, the conversation remains incomplete and no post-processing actions happen.

To make a question mandatory, apply the mandatory label to it. See Labels for more information.

Restriction: Internal: When configuring the API endpoint, mandatory-question support requires the Conversations endpoint and not the Responses endpoint.

When there are no mandatory questions in a conversation, the system flags the underlying survey record as "complete" (COMPLETION_PENDING) after every response. This can trigger text analytics and alerts after each respondent response.

All mandatory questions must be answered

When a conversation includes mandatory questions, the system flags the record as complete only after all mandatory questions are answered. Until then, the survey record remains in a pending state (NO_SURVEY_ENGINE). Once all mandatory questions are answered, the survey is marked as complete (COMPLETION_PENDING).

In this example, the conversation is complete after the respondent answers both the mandatory questions, even if they abandon the survey before answering the remaining questions.

Conversation with a Welcome message followed by two mandatory questions, and then by two regular questions

Never skip mandatory questions

Warning: Skipping a mandatory question causes the survey to be incomplete.

When a mandatory question is skipped due to conditions in the conversation flow, that question is never "resolved" and the conversation is always incomplete. In this illustration, the second mandatory question is skipped when the answer for the first question is 7 or more, which causes the conversation to remain incomplete.

Conversation with a mandatory question that is skipped when the answer to the first question is greater than or equal to 7. The conversation remains incomplete