Collect more responses with interactive WhatsApp surveys and 250+ industry-ready templates

A WhatsApp survey is a short feedback survey a business sends to customers as a WhatsApp message, so people answer right in the chat with a tap instead of opening a link to a web form. Questions can use tappable answer buttons, rating scales, and suggested replies, plus an open-ended question the customer simply types back. Because the whole survey happens in one conversation thread, it fits the way people already message every day.

The WhatsApp Business Platform is Meta's API for businesses that need to message customers on WhatsApp at scale, as opposed to the WhatsApp Business app a small shop runs from one phone. It is what lets a brand send approved message templates, interactive messages with buttons, and automated conversations to opted-in customers. Most teams reach it through a messaging provider such as Twilio, or directly through Meta, and WhatsApp Surveys connects to both.

They only need WhatsApp itself. The survey arrives as a normal WhatsApp message on Android or iPhone, and customers answer in that same chat, with no extra app, account, survey link, or form to load. If someone doesn't use WhatsApp, they won't receive the survey, so it works best for audiences who already message you there.

Yes. Recipients don't pay anything to receive or answer a WhatsApp message beyond their normal mobile data or Wi-Fi. The sending business pays: Meta charges per message (rates vary by country and message category), and your messaging provider may add its own fee.

A WhatsApp survey is answered inside the conversation, while email and SMS surveys usually send people to a link and a separate web form. On WhatsApp, customers tap an answer button or type a reply in the same thread, and the message comes from your business's WhatsApp account rather than an unfamiliar number or address. Removing the link-and-form step is the main reason in-chat surveys are easier to complete.

Yes. WhatsApp requires that people opt in before a business messages them, and every survey should make clear who it's from and how to stop: replying STOP unsubscribes them, with HELP pointing to support. You can't survey purchased lists. WhatsApp Surveys templates include opt-in and STOP handling so consent is built in rather than bolted on.

No. The channel doesn't change your legal obligations, it inherits them. The same rules that govern customer messaging and personal data still apply: get clear opt-in consent, identify yourself, honor opt-outs immediately, and handle responses under your privacy policy. This isn't legal advice, so confirm the specifics for your markets with counsel.

Often, yes. WhatsApp reports whether a business message was sent, delivered, and read, though read status only appears when the recipient has read receipts turned on. Survey senders use these statuses to see where a send stalled, alongside the actual answers customers tap or type.

You need a WhatsApp Business sender, a messaging provider, and approved survey templates. In practice: set up a WhatsApp Business account and phone number through a provider such as Twilio or Meta, connect it to WhatsApp Surveys, pick and customize a survey template, and submit it for Meta's template approval. Once the template is approved, you can send it to opted-in customers.

Meta requires approval for any message a business starts, so a survey you send first must be an approved message template. During review Meta also assigns the template a category, Utility or Marketing, which affects whether and where it can be delivered. Once a customer replies, the conversation can continue within WhatsApp's customer service window.

Utility templates are tied to a specific transaction or account event, like an order update or a survey anchored to a purchase the customer just made, while Marketing templates are anything promotional or general-interest. Meta enforces the category, can re-file a template during review, and Marketing templates are currently blocked from delivering to US numbers, so a re-filed survey can quietly stop arriving. WhatsApp Surveys shows Meta's real, final category on every survey and flags any change. Our post "Utility vs Marketing: why your WhatsApp survey can get blocked without warning" covers it in depth.

Meta charges the business per message, and the rate depends on the recipient's country and the message category (for example Utility versus Marketing), so there isn't one universal price. Your messaging provider may add its own per-message fee on top. Those sending charges are billed by the provider you connect, separate from your WhatsApp Surveys plan.

No. Most teams work through a messaging provider, such as Twilio, that handles the WhatsApp Business Platform connection and template submission for them, though you can also connect to Meta directly. You bring your brand and your surveys; the provider handles delivery.

A lot more than a plain text can. You can ask a tappable star rating, a 1-to-5 recommend scale, a Customer Satisfaction or Customer Effort question with suggested-reply chips, multiple-choice questions as tappable answer buttons, or a swipeable carousel of choices. You can branch on the answer (a low score opens a "what went wrong?" follow-up; a high score asks for a review) and end with an open-ended question the customer simply types back. Underneath it's still a conversation, so the whole survey happens in one thread, one tap at a time.

Yes on both counts. WhatsApp is genuinely two-way, so customers answer in the same thread, and suggested-reply chips and answer buttons make responding as easy as a tap. You can automate the survey with flows that branch on how someone answers, a low rating triggers a "sorry to hear that, what happened?" follow-up while a high rating asks for a public review, and with WhatsApp Surveys Pro you can layer in an AI assistant, grounded in your own knowledge base, that reads open-ended replies, asks a smart clarifying question, and routes urgent complaints to a human. That keeps your feedback loop running around the clock without anyone watching the inbox.

Yes. Because WhatsApp is a two-way channel, you get live response analytics: delivery and read statuses (read only when the recipient has read receipts on), every star rating and answer-button tap, and the open-ended replies customers type back, all rolling up in real time rather than waiting for a survey to close. You can watch your Net Promoter Score or Customer Satisfaction score move as responses land, segment by question, and read open-ended answers as they come in.

It's designed to, by removing the friction that holds email and SMS surveys back. A message from your own business account is recognizable; a tappable star rating or answer button lets customers respond in a single tap instead of clicking a link, loading a form, and switching apps; and because the survey lives in the inbox, people finish it in the same thread it arrived in. Your exact numbers will depend on your audience and timing, but the mechanics, more trust and one-tap answering instead of a link to a separate page, are squarely pointed at hearing back from far more of your customers.

No, it's built for marketing, customer-experience, and ops teams, not developers. Every survey template is drag-and-edit: swap the questions, scales, answer buttons, suggested replies, colors, and images in a visual editor without touching code. When you're ready to send, you connect your provider once and reuse it for every survey. Pro layers on CSV personalization (map fields like first name, order number, or visit date in a few clicks), multi-step branching survey flows, and AI that reads and follows up on open-ended replies, all configurable by anyone on the team. Developers can go deeper via your provider's API if you want to, but nothing here requires it.

250+ professionally designed, ready-to-send survey templates spanning 80+ survey categories across 13 industries (retail, hospitality, healthcare, events, real estate, finance, automotive, and more) plus 200+ ready-made multi-step survey flows. You'll find Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction, and Customer Effort surveys, post-purchase and post-visit feedback, event and onboarding check-ins, and more, each shipping with the right question types (star ratings, 1-to-5 scales, answer buttons, open-ended prompts) and on-brand styling already in place, so you start from something proven rather than a blank canvas. Full access to the entire library is included on every plan, including Free; Pro and Enterprise add personalization, AI follow-ups, branching flows, deeper analytics, and higher send volumes on top.

We're provider-flexible, so you're never locked in. Twilio and Meta are active now, with Vonage and Bandwidth coming soon, and you can always bring your own WhatsApp gateway and we'll help you wire it up. The key idea is build once, connect anywhere: you design and personalize your survey a single time, then point it at whichever backend fits your stack. Switch providers or add new ones whenever you need to, without rebuilding a thing.

Yes. On Pro you can upload a CSV and map fields like first name, order number, appointment date, or the product they bought into any survey in a few clicks, so every recipient gets a survey that reads like it was written for them ("How was your stay at the Harbor Suite, {{first_name}}?"). Personalization works hand in hand with branching flows and AI follow-ups, which means you can tailor not just the opening question but the whole conversation based on who they are and how they answer. It's the difference between a generic blast and a survey that feels one-to-one, at scale.

Yes. With Pro, an LLM grounded in your own knowledge base (FAQs, policies, listings, hours, pricing, and docs) can read what customers type back, ask a smart clarifying question in your brand voice, and act on it, around the clock. It handles real back-and-forth: thanking happy respondents and nudging them toward a public review, asking an unhappy respondent what specifically went wrong, summarizing themes across open-ended answers, and routing urgent complaints to a human the moment a response needs one. Pair it with branching survey flows to ask the right next question based on how someone rated you, so your feedback loop keeps running even outside business hours.

Yes. Bring-your-own-gateway is a core part of the design, so if you already have a WhatsApp provider or sender set up, you can connect it and keep your existing numbers and relationships. If you don't, you can start with one of our active integrations like Twilio or Meta. Either way you build and personalize your surveys once and route them through whatever backend you choose, which keeps you in control and avoids lock-in.

There's a Free plan that includes full access to the 250+ survey template library plus a handful of free WhatsApp sends to test, so you can run a real survey before paying anything. Pro adds CSV personalization, AI follow-ups, branching survey flows, provider integrations, deeper response analytics, and a monthly send allowance, with Enterprise for higher volumes and custom needs. Note that the per-message sending charges come from whichever provider you connect, separate from your plan, so you keep full visibility into those rates.

Right after the moment you're asking about, while it's still fresh. Trigger a post-purchase survey when the order is delivered, a post-visit survey within an hour or two of checkout, a support survey the moment a ticket closes, and an onboarding check-in a week or two in. Because WhatsApp lands in the inbox people actually watch, a well-timed one-tap question gets answered far more often than a survey email sent the next day. Keep it short, lead with a single rating, and only branch into deeper questions for people who tap through, you'll get more honest, more complete responses than a long form ever collects.

That's up to you, and it's worth deciding deliberately. Because you send to your own opted-in contacts, you generally know who you're surveying, which is great for closing the loop on a specific bad experience or following up one-to-one. When you want candid feedback at the program level (employee pulse checks, sensitive topics), you can present and report responses in aggregate so individuals aren't singled out, and make clear in the opening message how the answers will be used. Either way, every survey respects opt-in and STOP, and you should only collect what you actually need.

It depends on Meta's review, not on us. Every business-initiated WhatsApp survey has to be an approved message template, and Meta reviews each template and assigns it a category; your WhatsApp Business account and provider have their own setup and opt-in requirements too. A submission that's missing details or reads as promotional is the most common cause of a rejection or an unexpected Marketing category. WhatsApp Surveys streamlines it: templates are written to be transaction-anchored with opt-in and STOP handling built in, submissions pin the Utility category, and every survey shows the category Meta actually approved. We can't guarantee approval (that decision is Meta's), but a correctly formatted submission is the biggest lever for getting live faster.

Yes. WhatsApp Surveys is agent-native. An authenticated gateway (/api/agent) lets an autonomous AI agent discover, author, clone, render, send, and pull results from WhatsApp surveys without anyone clicking through a dashboard. The same gateway is exposed three ways over one typed contract: a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, a command-line tool, and an embeddable client. So whether you're building on Claude, an agent SDK, or your own service, the platform behaves like a first-class tool rather than a website you have to script a browser against.

Yes. The @wa-surveys/agent-toolkit ships an MCP server called wa-surveys-mcp (hand-rolled, zero runtime dependencies, JSON-RPC over stdio). Register it once with any MCP host — for Claude it's a single `claude mcp add` command pointing at npx -y -p @wa-surveys/agent-toolkit wa-surveys-mcp with your agent key (the toolkit talks to the hosted gateway by default) — and your agent gains ten native tools: capabilities, search_surveys, get_survey, render_survey, create_survey, clone_survey, submit_survey, send_survey, get_results, and get_usage. The MCP server is available on the Pro plan.

Yes to both. Under the hood everything runs over the /api/agent HTTP gateway, and the agent toolkit wraps it as a JSON-in/JSON-out CLI (the `wa-surveys` command) so you can search, render, clone, create, send, and read results from a shell, CI, or an agent loop — pipe it straight into jq. There's also a typed GatewayClient you can embed in your own code. The packaged MCP server and CLI are Pro-plan features; the gateway and typed client are available to embed in your own service.

Agents authenticate with scoped API keys (prefixed wak_), minted by an org admin and shown only once before being stored as a hash. Each key carries a least-privilege set of scopes — surveys:read, surveys:write, surveys:submit, marketplace:clone, surveys:send, results:read, usage:read — so a key can only do what it was minted for, and it's revocable at any time. The agent gateway is a separate rail from the human app: neither token works on the other's surface. Sending is hardened too — destinations are validated as E.164 numbers, the gateway is rate-limited, and an agent send must clear the exact same provider-approval gate as a human send, so there's no back door to ship an unapproved survey.

Yes. Four packaged skill chains string the tools into repeatable jobs: find-and-clone-survey (shop the marketplace and clone the best-fit survey), author-and-publish (turn a brief into a validated survey and submit it for approval), survey-in-a-box (clone, validate, send, and report the response funnel), and response-analyst (read results and open-ended replies and summarize the themes). Each declares the least-privilege scopes it needs, so you can mint a key that matches exactly one workflow. A per-call crypto payment rail (x402, USDC on Base) for cloning and sending without an account is fully designed and coming soon.