Respond to a questionnaire in the third-party portal

As a third-party contact, respond to assessment questionnaires issued by your assessment team. You can answer questions directly in the portal, use a spreadsheet template, or use a SIG questionnaire format to provide your responses.

Before you begin

Important:

This content describes the questionnaire response workflow in Smart Assessment Engine (SAE). The questionnaire owner, contributor, and submission model described here applies to SAE only. With the classic engine, a single assigned primary contact responds to and submits questionnaires (no owner/contributor model). For details on the SAE questionnaire workflow, see Questionnaire ownership and contributor access and Third-party portal contact roles and permissions.

Role required: third-party primary contact or assigned secondary contact

About this task

When your assessment team creates a questionnaire and assigns it to your third-party or engagement organization, all primary contacts receive a notification with details about the assessment. If you are a primary contact, you are responsible for ensuring the questionnaire is completed and submitted. Secondary contacts can help complete the questionnaire but cannot submit it.

The questionnaire owner (typically the alphabetically first primary contact by last name) is the only contact who can submit the completed questionnaire. If needed, the questionnaire owner can reassign the questionnaire to another eligible contact.

Procedure

Launch the third-party portal at [your instance URL]/svdp and log in with your credentials.
On the portal home page, locate the questionnaire you need to respond to.

Questionnaires appear in the portal with a status indicator showing whether they are New, In progress, or Completed.
Select the questionnaire to open it and review the questions.

Note: You can view contact details for the questionnaire owner and any contributors assigned to help complete it. The questionnaire owner is responsible for final submission.
Answer the questions by selecting a response option or typing your answer in the provided field.
1. For multiple choice or rating scale questions, select the appropriate option.
2. For open-ended questions, type your response in the text area. Responses are automatically saved when you move to the next field.
3. If you need to attach supporting documents, select the attachment icon and upload the file.
Note: Your responses are automatically saved, so you do not need to manually save after each entry.
If you are a contributor (not the questionnaire owner), continue answering questions and notify the questionnaire owner when your section is complete.

Contributors can view and respond to assigned questions but cannot mark the questionnaire as complete or submit it. Use comments or the portal's communication features to coordinate with the questionnaire owner.
If you are the questionnaire owner, review all responses once contributors have completed their sections.

The questionnaire owner should verify that all questions have been answered and that responses are accurate before submission.
To mark the questionnaire as complete, select Mark as complete (available only to the questionnaire owner).

After marking as complete, the questionnaire status changes to Completed.
Select Submit to submit the completed questionnaire to your assessment team (questionnaire owner only).

Note: After submission, you can no longer edit your responses unless the assessment team reopens the questionnaire for additional information.

Result

Your completed questionnaire has been submitted to your assessment team. Your assessment team will review your responses and may contact you for clarification or follow-up questions.

What to do next

If you need to reassign the questionnaire to another eligible contact before submission, select the more actions menu icon and choose Reassign. After reassignment, you will no longer have access to the questionnaire. Contributors can continue working on the questionnaire after reassignment if they are included in the contributors list.

If your assessment team returns a submitted questionnaire and flags one or more questions for follow-up, select Show follow-up only to display just the flagged questions.

Related topics

Managing the Third-party portal

Third-party portal contact roles and permissions

Questionnaire ownership and contributor access

Manage questionnaire contributors and ownership

Invite a contact to the third-party portal

Using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet template for external questionnaires

Respond using a Microsoft Excel template

Using the SIG questionnaire for a risk assessment

Respond using the SIG

title	Respond to a questionnaire in the third-party portal
description	As a third-party contact, respond to assessment questionnaires issued by your assessment team. You can answer questions directly in the portal, use a spreadsheet template, or use a SIG questionnaire format to provide your responses.
locale	en-US
canonical_url	https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/governance-risk-compliance/third-party-risk-management/tprm-portal-respond-questionnaire.html
release	brazil
product	Third-party Risk Management
classification	third-party-risk-management
topic_type	task
last_updated	2026-09-10
reading_time_minutes	5
breadcrumb	Third-party portal contact roles and permissionsManage the third-party portalThird-party Risk ManagementGovernanceRiskand Compliance