Here are some of the best questions for a B2B buyer survey about onboarding expectations—and a few tips to help you create one that delivers actionable insights. With Specific, you can build a tailored onboarding survey in seconds: just generate your survey with AI, no manual setup required.
The best open-ended questions for B2B buyer onboarding expectations
Open-ended questions are your most powerful tool for truly understanding buyers’ onboarding expectations. They let you surface what matters most—unfiltered and in context—so you’re not limited by the options you might imagine in advance. This approach is especially valuable when you want to gain deeper qualitative insight or identify themes you haven’t considered yet. You’ll be surprised: open questions often reveal the “why” behind the “what”.
Here are 10 of the best open-ended questions to ask in a B2B buyer survey about onboarding:
What’s the most important thing you expect from our onboarding process?
Can you describe a great onboarding experience you’ve had in the past? What made it stand out?
What would make onboarding with us feel effortless for your team?
Are there any challenges or concerns you anticipate during onboarding?
How do you prefer to receive onboarding support and communication?
What information do you need before you feel confident using our product or service?
What are your timelines or deadlines for being fully set up?
How do you measure a successful onboarding—for yourself or your organization?
Is there any aspect of onboarding that has frustrated you with other vendors?
If you could change one thing about our onboarding experience, what would it be?
Open-ended responses help you empathize with buyers, identify pain points you may not expect, and design onboarding that feels tailor-made. Remember: 78% of B2B buyers expect personalized engagement based on prior interactions—going beyond generic surveys is key. [1]
The best multiple-choice (single-select) questions for quantifying onboarding expectations
Single-select multiple-choice questions are ideal when you want to quickly quantify preferences, priorities, or experiences—and they create an easy entry point for respondents who might feel “stuck” on an open-ended prompt. Sometimes, it’s easier for B2B buyers to pick from a shortlist of common scenarios before you dive deeper. You get simple, segmented data for baseline stats—and you can always add a follow-up question to dig further into their rationale.
Question: Which aspect of onboarding matters most to you?
Speed of set-up
Personal guidance
Comprehensive documentation
Ongoing check-ins
Other
Question: How do you prefer to be guided through onboarding?
Live calls or meetings
Email or help articles
Self-serve onboarding (automated tools)
Combination of the above
Question: When do you expect to see results from using our product after onboarding?
Immediately
Within 1 week
Within 1 month
Longer
When to follow up with "why?"—Whenever you want to understand the reasoning behind a choice, ask “why?” as a follow-up. This instantly reveals context you’d never discover with closed questions alone. For example: If a buyer selects “Speed of set-up” as their top priority, ask, “Why is fast onboarding important to you? Can you tell us about a past experience where this mattered?”
When and why to add the "Other" choice?—Always consider including “Other” as a choice. This gives buyers a chance to tell you what’s missing, surfacing fresh needs or expectations you hadn’t listed. Follow up: “You selected ‘Other’. Could you describe what you had in mind?”—this often uncovers insights you’d never predict in advance.
Using an NPS-style question for onboarding expectations
An NPS (Net Promoter Score) question asks buyers how likely they are to recommend your onboarding experience to a colleague or peer. It’s simple but powerful—especially when paired with smart follow-up questions. NPS benchmarks overall satisfaction and highlights risks or opportunities quickly. For onboarding, it’s an excellent pulse check: if promoters outnumber detractors, you know you’re delivering on expectations. When adoption is complicated—60% of B2B buyers find their latest purchase process complicated—NPS is a direct way to stay on top of buyer sentiment. [1]
Want to try an NPS survey for B2B buyer onboarding? Generate an NPS onboarding survey in one click.
The power of follow-up questions
Follow-up questions are the unlocking mechanism for rich, actionable feedback. With automated follow-ups powered by Specific’s AI, you’ll never be left guessing what a B2B buyer really means. Our platform probes in real time—clarifying, digging deeper, and exploring nuance just like a great human researcher. This means you capture the true context without dozens of back-and-forth emails. Thanks to these adaptive follow-ups, survey conversations feel natural and buyers are more likely to share honest, high-quality insights.
B2B Buyer: “Our biggest challenge is integration.”
AI follow-up: “Can you share more about the specific integration issues you’re concerned about? Are there tools or platforms you want to connect with first?”
How many follow-ups to ask?—In most cases, 2-3 follow-up questions are enough to get deep context without creating survey fatigue. With smart logic, you can let respondents skip to the next question once you’ve gathered the insight you need. In Specific, these settings are customizable per survey.
This makes it a conversational survey—Your survey turns into a true conversation, not just a form. Respondents engage as if they’re chatting with an expert, not ticking boxes on a form.
AI survey analysis. Analyze open-ended responses with AI.—Even when you gather lots of unstructured responses, analyzing the data is simple. With AI-powered survey response analysis, you can instantly pull key themes, top issues, and even segment analysis in natural language—so you actually use your findings instead of dreading the “data dump”.
Automated follow-up questions are a major leap forward in survey design. If you haven’t tried them, generate a survey now and experience the difference.
How to compose a prompt for ChatGPT or GPTs for great onboarding survey questions
Prompting AI can be straightforward, but better results come from clear, contextual instructions. For example, to generate open-ended questions for your B2B buyer onboarding survey, use:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for B2B buyer survey about onboarding expectations.
Giving more context always helps the AI generate more targeted and useful questions. Try expanding your prompt:
We're launching a new SaaS product and want to understand what B2B buyers expect during onboarding. Suggest 10 open-ended questions to uncover their pain points, preferences, and success criteria.
Once you have your initial set of questions, ask AI for structure:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
Pick your favorite categories to explore deeper, then prompt:
Generate 10 questions for the categories ‘integration challenges’ and ‘success measurement’.
What is a conversational survey?
Conversational surveys let you gather feedback in a form that feels like a chat rather than a sterile web form. This approach is a massive improvement for both experience and data quality: respondents are more engaged, answers are deeper, and teams can easily ask clarifying questions in real time. With AI survey generators like Specific, you simply describe what you want—the AI turns it into a custom, interactive survey with follow-up logic and expert tone. No tedious setup required.
Manual Survey Creation | AI-Generated Survey (Conversational) |
|---|---|
Write questions by hand, test logic manually | Chat to create, AI drafts + refines instantly |
Static, non-adaptive questions | Automated follow-ups and contextual probing |
Hard to analyze unstructured answers | AI summarizes, highlights themes, and segments for you |
Slow to update or iterate | Update instantly via AI survey editor |
Why use AI for B2B buyer surveys? AI-led survey creation is lightning-fast, taps into expert-level structures, and eliminates the “blank page” problem when writing questions. Your team gets results faster, and buyers benefit from a modern, conversational experience that respects their time and delivers personalized engagement—just what 65% of B2B buyers expect from vendors today. [2]
With Specific, you get best-in-class conversational surveys purpose-built for B2B feedback—smooth for creators and a pleasure for busy buyers to answer. For more, check out this guide on how to create an onboarding expectations survey step by step.
See this onboarding expectations survey example now
Get inspired by how fast and engaging a conversational B2B buyer onboarding survey can be—see what a difference AI-powered, follow-up-driven surveys make. Create your onboarding expectations survey and discover clearer, richer insights with less effort today.