Best questions for customer survey about onboarding experience

Here are some of the best questions for a customer survey about onboarding experience, plus tips on crafting them for real insights. If you need to build your survey fast, Specific lets you generate a tailored onboarding experience survey in seconds with expert-level AI.

Best open-ended questions for customer survey about onboarding experience

If you want to unlock honest, actionable feedback, open-ended questions are your friend. They let customers tell their story in their own words, revealing friction points and delightful surprises you might miss with rigid questions. We recommend using them when you want depth, context, or emotions—not just a number. Here are some of our favorites for a customer onboarding survey:

1. What was the most confusing part of your onboarding experience?

2. Can you describe how the onboarding process made you feel?

3. Were there any steps you expected but didn’t find during onboarding?

4. What, if anything, surprised you—good or bad—while getting started?

5. What made you decide to complete (or abandon) the onboarding process?

6. If you could change one thing about our onboarding, what would it be?

7. How did you first hear about our onboarding resources or support?

8. What was your biggest “aha!” moment—or what do you wish had been explained better?

9. In your opinion, what would make onboarding with us even easier?

10. Is there anything we could have done to help you achieve your first success faster?

Open feedback like this drives better outcomes—companies that invest in exceptional onboarding retain 91% of their customers and stand out in customer loyalty. [1]

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for customer survey about onboarding experience

Single-select multiple-choice questions are perfect for when you want something you can quantify, or when you want to make it easy to answer fast. Sometimes people hesitate to write out long responses, so giving clear choices can start the conversation and help you spot trends. Follow up with deeper questions when something stands out.

Question: How would you rate the clarity of our onboarding instructions?

• Very clear

• Somewhat clear

• Neutral

• Somewhat unclear

• Very unclear

Question: How long did it take you to complete onboarding?

• Less than 10 minutes

• 10–30 minutes

• 30 minutes to 1 hour

• More than 1 hour

• I didn’t complete onboarding

Question: What was your primary goal during onboarding?

• Learning how to use the product

• Connecting with support

• Setting up integrations

• Exploring features

• Other

When to follow up with "why?" If a respondent picks an unexpected or negative option ("Very unclear" or "I didn’t complete onboarding"), it’s the ideal time to ask why. Simply ask, “Can you tell us more about what was unclear?” or “What stopped you from completing onboarding?”—this opens the door to rich insights that quant data alone can't provide.

When and why to add the "Other" choice?If respondents don’t see themselves in your listed options, “Other” lets them share something outside your assumptions. A quick follow-up (“Could you describe your goal in more detail?”) can surface pain points or motivations you never considered.

By quantifying common responses and then digging deeper, you can spot issues before they become support costs—companies without strong onboarding spend 47% more per customer on support. [3]

Should you include an NPS (net promoter score) question?

NPS (Net Promoter Score) asks people, “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” It's a powerful measure because it blends emotion, satisfaction, and advocacy in one number. For onboarding, an NPS question helps you link the ease of your onboarding process with long-term loyalty. Since 86% of customers will pay more for a great onboarding experience [2], catching promoters and detractors early signals overall health. You can deploy a ready-made NPS onboarding survey in a couple of clicks using Specific.

The power of follow-up questions

Hard data is great, but the real gold comes from smart, real-time follow-up questions. We built Specific to ask the right clarifying or “dig deeper” question as soon as a customer’s reply hints at nuance. With our AI-driven follow-up feature, you gather context in the moment—no need to chase them via email later.

• Customer response: “It was ok, but I got lost at the integration step.”

• AI follow-up: “Which part of the integration felt unclear or difficult? Can you describe what you tried and what happened?”

Without follow-ups, you might have just “ok”—no actionable next steps. Our AI—trained to follow up like a human interviewer—saves your team hours and uncovers the friction hidden in vague answers.

How many followups to ask? Two or three well-timed follow-up questions usually do the trick. With Specific, you can set the max depth for probing, or tell the AI to move on once it gathers the info you need.

This makes it a conversational survey: It’s no longer a cold form—it’s a real conversation, which leads to higher participation and more genuine detail.

AI-powered analysis, summaries, and ease of use: Even if your survey gathers loads of free-text responses, analyzing responses with AI is lightning quick—spot trends, quantify themes, or ask AI for summaries in plain language.

Conversational, follow-up-driven surveys are a new concept—try generating your own survey and see how easy it is to get richer answers from your customers.

How to prompt ChatGPT (or other GPTs) to generate better onboarding questions

If you want to brainstorm questions with AI or just want to see another perspective, prompts matter. The more context you provide, the better the questions will be. Here’s a simple start:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for customer survey about onboarding experience.

If you add context about your product or customer goals, results get sharper:

We are a SaaS company helping marketing teams manage campaigns. Our onboarding includes both self-service product tours and 1:1 onboarding calls. Suggest 10 open-ended questions for a customer survey about onboarding experience, focused on discovering friction in scheduling calls and using our self-service tutorials.

Next, you can categorize the questions with this prompt:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Once you’ve got categories that matter most, double down:

Generate 10 questions for categories “integration challenges” and “assisted onboarding feedback”.

Iterate like this and you’ll get both breadth and depth, tailored to your use case. For more, check out the AI survey generator and the chat-based survey editor—they streamline this process even more.

What is a conversational survey—and why is AI better?

Conversational surveys move away from static forms—they’re a real-time dialog where questions and follow-ups flow naturally, just like a live interview. These AI-driven surveys adjust in real time, probing for detail when something’s unclear or interesting. Compared to manual survey forms, the stats aren’t even close—conversational formats get richer answers and higher completion rates.

Why use AI for customer surveys? With AI, you can go from rough idea to finished conversational survey in minutes—not hours or days. You’ll capture richer context, have more fun as a respondent, and spend less time analyzing open-ended answers. With Specific, you get best-in-class AI survey experiences: smarter AI probing, top-notch data security, and a feedback flow that feels like a chat with an expert researcher. See our how-to guide for creating customer onboarding surveys for a walkthrough and best practices.

If you want to see more examples or try a survey, check out the onboarding experience survey generator—it puts all these principles into practice.

See this onboarding experience survey example now

Get started and see a conversational AI survey in action—capture deep onboarding feedback with smart follow-ups, automated analysis, and a truly engaging experience for your customers.