Best questions for saas customer survey about api usability

Here are some of the best questions for a SaaS customer survey about API usability, plus tips on how to build them. You can use Specific to quickly generate an effective API usability survey in seconds.

Best open-ended questions for SaaS customer survey about API usability

Open-ended questions are essential for gaining real, contextual feedback about API usability. They let respondents use their own words, helping you uncover pain points and ideas you might otherwise miss. These questions are great when you want detailed feedback or stories, especially if your goal is to improve user experience.

1. What was your initial impression when you started using our API for the first time?

2. Can you describe a recent situation where the API helped—or failed to help—you achieve your goal?

3. What do you find most intuitive or confusing about our API documentation?

4. Are there parts of the API integration process you wish were simpler? Which ones?

5. Can you share an example of a challenge you encountered when integrating with our API?

6. How well does our API handle errors or unexpected input from your perspective?

7. Is there functionality you expected to find in our API, but didn’t?

8. How would you improve the reliability or uptime of our API?

9. What features or endpoints would you like to see added to our API?

10. Are there any aspects of our API that slow down your development process?

As user-centric APIs can reduce development time by up to 45% [1], these questions help pinpoint where you can save your customers valuable time and effort.

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for SaaS customer survey about API usability

Single-select multiple-choice questions are ideal when you need to quantify results or kick off a conversation. They help respondents choose quickly from concise options. This can help you spot trends or frustrations that warrant deeper exploration through followups.

Question: How would you rate the overall ease of use of our API?

• Very easy

• Somewhat easy

• Somewhat difficult

• Very difficult

Question: Which part of the API experience do you find most challenging?

• Authentication and access

• Documentation and examples

• Error messages and debugging

• Other

Question: How often do you run into issues with API uptime or reliability?

• Frequently

• Sometimes

• Rarely

• Never

When to followup with "why?" Use a "why" followup when an answer signals frustration or confusion—like a user selecting "Somewhat difficult"—so you can understand the specific pain point or reason behind their choice. For example, ask, “Can you tell me more about the difficulties you’ve experienced?”

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Add “Other” if you suspect there might be challenges outside your list. Followups to “Other” responses can reveal unexpected insights—sometimes the biggest opportunities for improvement come from what you didn’t anticipate. With 44% of marketers struggling with missing integrations [2], leaving space for new feedback can be crucial.

NPS for API usability: why it matters

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a proven, fast way to measure customer loyalty and predict growth. For API usability, asking “How likely are you to recommend our API to a colleague?” gives you a single, comparable metric—and helps you track changes over time. It’s especially relevant when you want a data point you can benchmark against industry standards. You can instantly generate an NPS survey about API usability for SaaS customers with Specific.

The power of follow-up questions

In API usability surveys, follow-up questions can make all the difference. They let you move past surface-level answers and uncover what customers really want. Automated followups using Specific’s AI make the process effortless and scalable, transforming each answer into a conversation and saving the time you'd otherwise spend chasing clarity.

• SaaS Customer: "It’s okay, but sometimes slow."

• AI follow-up: "Could you tell us more about when you notice slowdowns—are there specific endpoints or workflows affected?"

How many followups to ask? Typically, 2-3 followup questions are sufficient. You can set your followup depth in Specific, and it automatically moves on once you’ve captured useful details, keeping the conversation smooth and avoiding survey fatigue.

This makes it a conversational survey—you get richer context and better insights, making it feel natural for the respondent.

AI analysis, easy filtering: Even if you collect a lot of detailed free-text replies, AI-powered response analysis makes it easy to group, summarize, and search through them instantly. You don’t have to worry about being buried under qualitative feedback.

For anyone still relying on manual survey followup via email, or generic forms—try generating a survey with automated followups using Specific to really see the difference.

How to prompt ChatGPT to generate survey questions

If you want to ideate with AI, great prompts make all the difference. For starters, you can just ask:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for SaaS customer survey about API usability.

You’ll get better results if you provide extra context, such as who your customers are, what your SaaS does, which API endpoints are most used, or your main business goal. For example:

We have a B2B SaaS platform used by small fintech companies integrating payments. Suggest 10 targeted open-ended questions to help us understand pain points with our API onboarding and documentation.

Once you have a list, try:

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

Next, review the categories—such as onboarding, reliability, support, and security—and prompt:

Generate 10 questions for the categories onboarding and reliability.

Keep customizing until you get the depth you need. This way, you’ll cover all key areas relevant to your audience.

What is a conversational survey?

A conversational survey feels like a natural chat, not a boring spreadsheet or static webform. Instead of answering a long list of rigid questions, respondents interact naturally, one question at a time, with smart AI followups. This helps make feedback honest, detailed, and much easier to act on.

Here’s how AI survey generation compares to manual survey creation:

Why use AI for SaaS customer surveys? For API usability, AI-generated surveys adapt to each respondent in real time, leading to richer insights and higher completion rates—key for addressing issues like reliability, which is critical when average API uptime slipped from 99.66% to 99.46% this year, increasing downtime by 60% [3].

Looking for a step-by-step guide? See our article on how to create a survey for SaaS customers about API usability. With Specific, both creators and respondents benefit from a best-in-class, seamless conversational experience—a true gamechanger for continuous improvement.

See this API usability survey example now

Gain deep, actionable insights from your SaaS customers—see how a conversational, AI-powered survey can transform your API usability research. Act now to understand pain points, boost satisfaction, and unlock new growth for your product.