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Can I cancel a survey that is already scheduled?

Written by Alex Bitca

Yes. When a transactional campaign uses the Delay option, each triggered survey waits on the Queue page until its send time arrives. While a survey is in the queue, you can still stop it from going out. You can do this manually from the Queue page, and you can set up throttling to do it automatically.

This is useful when something changes between the moment a survey is triggered and the moment it is due to send. A common example: an order triggers a survey with a 7 day delay, but the order is refunded a day later, so you no longer want to ask the customer to rate that purchase.


Cancel a queued survey manually

The Queue page lists every delayed transactional survey that has been triggered but not yet sent.

  1. Open the Queue page from the main navigation.

  2. Use the filters or search to find the contact whose survey you want to stop.

  3. Select the survey record using its checkbox (you can select several at once).

  4. Choose Cancel to remove the selected surveys from the queue.

Cancelled surveys are removed from the queue and will not be sent.

Only delayed transactional surveys appear on the Queue page. Regular (recurring) campaigns and surveys without a configured delay are not listed there, because they are not held in the queue.


Cancel a queued survey automatically with throttle

The only way to cancel a queued survey automatically is with the Throttle option, found in the transactional campaign's Trigger section.

When throttle is set to All campaigns, a contact who has already been surveyed in any campaign within the throttle period will have new triggered surveys in this campaign dismissed automatically, including surveys already waiting in the queue. Retently checks the throttle again right before a queued survey is sent, so if the contact was surveyed elsewhere in the meantime, the queued survey is dismissed instead of going out.

You can use this to cancel a survey when a later event makes it irrelevant, by surveying the contact in a separate campaign first.

Example: skip the purchase survey when an order is refunded

Suppose a purchase triggers a satisfaction survey with a 7 day delay, and you do not want that survey to send if the order is refunded within those 7 days.

  1. Create a separate campaign for refunds, for example a short CSAT asking how the refund request was handled by your team.

  2. Trigger that refund survey as soon as a refund happens, before the 7 day delay on the purchase survey is up.

  3. On the purchase campaign, turn Throttle on and set it to All campaigns, with a period that comfortably covers the delay.

When the refund survey is sent, the contact counts as already surveyed. The queued purchase survey then fails the throttle check and is dismissed automatically, so the customer only receives the refund survey.

See About survey throttling for the full behavior.


Why Retently does not drop the survey on its own

Retently evaluates a campaign's audience at the moment a survey is scheduled, not again at the moment it is sent. A contact who matched the audience when the survey was triggered will still receive it, even if their details change while the survey waits in the queue.

Because of this, a later change (such as a refund that would move the contact out of the audience) does not automatically remove an already queued survey. To handle these cases, cancel the survey manually from the Queue page, or use the throttle approach above.


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