The start card — what people see before question one

A start card is a short screen shown before the first question, with a Start button on it. Turn it on and nobody is asked anything until they tap Start.

The switch is Intro screen, on an eflow’s Overview tab, under Before the first question.

What the card says

Four things, and Acquainto writes all of them from what it already knows — there is no copy to author here:

• Who is asking — your organization name, your mark, your color.
• How long it will take — the number of questions and a minute estimate, counted from the eflow itself rather than guessed.
• That it is an AI — that the assistant asks the questions, may ask a follow-up, and that answers are in the respondent’s own words.
• Where the answers go — your name, with a link to your privacy notice if you have set one.

If you have written an opening statement (see Closing, and the CTA for the matching control at the other end), it appears on this card too.

Why it changes your numbers

Nothing is recorded until someone taps Start. Without the card, the conversation begins the moment the link is opened — which includes link checkers in mail gateways, chat-app preview fetchers, and crawlers. Those all count as started conversations and none of them finish, so your completion rate reads lower than it truly is.

With the card on, those fetches stop at the card and never become a conversation.

The account default, and why it is not retroactive

Settings → Workspace carries a default for new eflows. It is off unless you change it, which means the card is something you opt into rather than something that appears without warning on eflows you have already sent.

The account default is read once, when an eflow is created. After that the eflow’s own switch is the only thing that matters. Changing the default will never put a Start button in front of an eflow that is already live and being answered, and never take one away from an eflow whose author turned it on.

Nothing in that sequence was set by hand. Both eflows were made through the authoring wizard, which has no intro-screen field of its own, so the account default was the only thing that could decide either one.

Where the card appears — and where it never does

The floating chat box is deliberately excluded. It opens on a click, so a person has already acted by the time it appears — there is no crawler to stop, and a Start button would be a second tap inside a small panel.

One eflow, one switch, both of these at the same time — the iframe embed gets the card:

and the floating chat box, with the identical setting, never does:

Someone who is coming back

A respondent returning in the same browser they started in does not get the card again, even with the switch on. They see Welcome back and their own transcript so far. Putting a Start button in front of half-finished answers would read as having lost them.

Returning in a different browser is a different case, and it depends on the link. A shared link only knows a respondent by their own browser, so a new browser is a new conversation and the card shows again. A personalized link carries who it was sent to, so it resumes anywhere — and the card says so, You can stop and come back on any device from this link, instead of on this device.