Inquiry Model Lifecycle

An inquiry wraps a single interaction with your customer through a single use case. The Lifecycle model articulates the various stages and statues that an inquiry can move through across it’s creation to conclusion. The model include four phases, some of which include multiple statuses.

Statuses

Inquiry statuses allow you to track where individuals are in the process, and status changes trigger your configured webhooks.

Events change Statues

Inquiries have formal events, like inquiry.created and inquiry.approved that drive changes to the statues. The events are useful to know when building logic on persona as these events can also be used as triggers in post-inquiry processes like workflows. Inquiry events and related statuses can change when:

Your end user proceeds through their inquiry: starting a verification or completing the flow.
Post-inquiry workflows apply business logic to automatically decision the inquiry or mark for manual review.
Your organization’s members manually change the status of an inquiry.
The inquiry expires.

Phase	Status	Event Name	Status Description
`Created`	`created`	`inquiry.created`	Set when the inquiry is first created.
`Pending`	`pending`	`inquiry.started`	Set when the end user submits a document or begins a verification.
`Done`	`completed`	`inquiry.completed`	Set when end user reaches the Completed screen.
`Done`	`failed`	`inquiry.failed`	Set when end user reaches the Failed screen.
`Done`	`expired`	`inquiry.expired`	Set when inquiry exceeds 24hrs, or configured duration, after inquiry created.
`Post-Inquiry`	`approved`	`inquiry.approved`	Set via post-inquiry processes or manual update.
`Post-Inquiry`	`needs review`	`inquiry.needs_review`	Set via post-inquiry processes or manual update.
`Post-Inquiry`	`declined`	`inquiry.declined`	Set via post-inquiry processes or manual update.

For additional guidance, learn more about inquiry statuses in our Help Center.

What’s the difference between Done & Post-Inquiry?

While all inquiry runs will end up at some point in the Done phase, via the Completed, Failed, or Expired statuses, it only describes the inquiry from the end user perspective as they are “done” with it. But you have additional statuses you can use as part of deciding what to do with the inquiry, allowing to you move it to Approved, Needs Review, & Declined. These statuses can then be used by post-inquiry processes to drive additional logic and outcomes.

When selecting which events, and thus statues, to configure in your webhooks we strongly recommend configuring both approved & declined as they are the most actionable for your own systems.