Here are some of the best questions for an API developers survey about API reliability, plus tips on making your survey more insightful. You can build an API reliability survey that’s ready in seconds with Specific’s AI-powered tools.
Best open-ended questions for API developers about API reliability
Open-ended questions let developers share detailed insights you won’t get from mere ratings. They’re perfect for surfacing real pain points, new ideas, or explanations behind the numbers—and especially valuable for qualitative research before diving into themes. Use these when you care about “why” and “how.”
Can you describe the most significant API reliability issue you've experienced in the past six months?
What impact do API outages or errors have on your team’s workflow?
How do you currently assess if an API is reliable enough for your production needs?
What monitoring or alerting tools do you use to track API reliability?
Can you recall a time when an unreliable API forced you to change your implementation strategy?
What would make you more confident using a third-party or internal API in a critical project?
How do you prefer to report or escalate API reliability issues when they arise?
Which improvements to documentation or developer support could make API reliability easier to manage?
What preventive actions do you take based on previous API reliability problems?
If you could ask API providers to prioritize one thing regarding reliability, what would it be?
Open-ended questions like these help ensure you don’t miss the deeper reasons behind developer frustrations—a key concern given that almost 30% of a developer’s time goes into programming and working with APIs, according to recent industry analysis. [2]
Best single-select multiple-choice questions for API developers
Single-select multiple-choice questions are the backbone for clear, quantifiable feedback. They're especially useful for benchmarking, segmenting developer experience, or kickstarting a follow-up conversation. Sometimes a specific set of options helps respondents focus—and it’s simpler to analyze.
Question: How often do you encounter API outages or disruptions in your current stack?
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Rarely or never
Question: When an API reliability issue occurs, how do you usually respond?
Retry requests automatically
Switch to a backup API
Contact support or provider
Pause related features
Question: Which factor most influences your perception of an API’s reliability?
Historical uptime stats
Community reputation
Provider communications
Other
When to follow up with “why”? Ask “why?” after initial selections to dig beneath the surface. For example, if a developer picks “Pause related features,” a follow-up like “Why is pausing features your preferred response?” brings context you’d never get from a multiple-choice chart alone. This makes your survey a goldmine, especially when reliability issues are on the rise—the global average API uptime actually dropped from 99.66% to 99.46% in just one year, resulting in nearly 9 extra hours of downtime annually for critical services. [1]
When and why to add the “Other” choice? Add this choice whenever your list might not capture every reality, especially in a fast-evolving field. Respondents selecting “Other” can describe edge cases or new trends—sometimes sparking your next product or process improvement. Follow-up questions can capture these unexpected insights efficiently.
Should you ask an NPS question in API reliability surveys?
NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a standardized way to gauge loyalty and perception—typically measured by “How likely are you to recommend [product] to a friend or colleague?” For API reliability, it tells you if developers are delighted or frustrated enough to warn others away. With APIs powering so many core app features (90% of developers use APIs, and most use multiple sources [2]), tying reliability to overall satisfaction is both strategic and actionable.
If you want to pinpoint reliability’s influence on advocacy, add an NPS question. You can generate an NPS survey for API developers focused on API reliability with Specific—no manual setup needed. This way, you can compare NPS with follow-up comments to truly understand the “why” behind the score.
The power of follow-up questions
If you’re not leveraging automated follow-up questions, you’re missing serious depth. Follow-ups—especially with AI—pick up when responses are vague or incomplete and prompt for critical details in the moment. That’s what makes a survey conversational, rather than a stale form.
API developer: “API reliability is sometimes an issue.”
AI follow-up: “Can you tell me about a specific recent incident where reliability was a problem for you?”
This goes from generic to actionable in seconds—no chasing down respondents by email.
How many followups to ask? Two or three relevant follow-up questions are usually enough. Keep it targeted: Specific’s survey builder has settings to limit depth or skip ahead if a clear answer is reached, so developers aren’t stuck rehashing the same point.
This makes it a conversational survey: These kind of surveys flow like a real conversation, engaging developers, and yielding high-quality context without hassle.
Easy AI analysis: Thanks to AI-driven response analysis, you can organize and summarize tons of open-text feedback in minutes—even if you’ve never analyzed text answers before. You’ll see themes, pain points, and opportunities, without manual coding or spreadsheet wrangling.
Curious? Try generating a survey to feel the difference. Follow-up automation is a game-changer.
How to prompt ChatGPT for better API reliability survey questions
AI is great at surfacing new angles, but clear prompts give you far better outputs. Start simple, then add context for sharper results.
Start with a basic prompt:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for API developers survey about API reliability.
Get more tailored ideas if you describe your goal or background:
I want to collect actionable feedback from experienced API developers about recurring API reliability issues, including the impact on their workflows and what improvements matter most for mission-critical systems. Suggest 10 open-ended survey questions.
Let the AI organize your questions by category:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
Then, drill into what matters most to you:
Generate 10 follow-up questions focused on the “incident response” and “reliability monitoring” categories.
By iterating this way, you get laser-focused survey questions and create more value for both you and your respondents. If you want to shortcut the process, just use the AI survey generator in Specific, which bakes this expertise in.
What is a conversational survey?
A conversational survey mimics human dialogue: it adapts based on responses, asks real-time follow-ups, and keeps the participant engaged. It’s a big leap from old-school static forms. With AI survey generators like Specific, you get:
Faster creation with expert-level starting questions
Automated probing for richer context
No need for deep survey design experience
Instant AI feedback analysis so you act, not just collect
Compare the experience:
Manual Survey | AI-generated Survey |
|---|---|
Static, one-size-fits-all questions | Conversational, adaptive to each respondent’s context |
Follow-ups require manual intervention | Automatic, in-the-moment follow-ups collect richer data |
Harder to analyze open responses | AI summarizes themes instantly |
Time-consuming setup | Survey generated in seconds using prompts |
Why use AI for API developers surveys? Because engineering teams have no time for endless emails or piecemeal gathering. With APIs crucial to 90% of projects (and reliability trouble on the rise) [2][1], instant feedback cycles matter more than ever. AI survey creation lets you keep pace—and lets your team focus on fixing and improving, not chasing data.
Want to see step-by-step how quick this is? Our guide to creating an API reliability survey for developers walks you through it, from idea to launch, including tips for customizing prompts and using automatic follow-ups.
Specific is built to give you the sharpest conversational survey experience available—easy for developers to answer, and even easier for you to analyze. You get higher response rates and clearer insights, minus the grunt work.
See this API reliability survey example now
Ready to understand what API developers think about reliability? See this AI survey example in action and generate your own, powered by instant follow-ups and streamlined AI analysis on Specific. Don’t settle for shallow feedback—unlock deep, actionable insights right from the first question.