Best questions for saas customer survey about customer effort score (ces)

Here are some of the best questions for a SaaS customer survey about customer effort score (CES), plus proven tips to create them. If you want to build a CES survey in seconds, you can use Specific’s AI to generate one instantly.

Best open-ended questions for SaaS customer survey about customer effort score (CES)

Open-ended questions help SaaS customers describe issues, obstacles, and wins in their own words. This uncovers what matters most—great for exploring early hunches, finding root causes, and collecting authentic feedback you’d never anticipate with rigid options.

Given that CES is 40% more predictive of customer loyalty than CSAT scores, tapping into nuanced feedback through open-format questions becomes essential for improving retention and driving growth. [1] Here’s our pick of top open-ended questions for your next CES survey:

1. What was the biggest challenge you faced while using our product today?

2. Can you describe a time when something in our app felt easy (or unexpectedly difficult) to use?

3. What’s one thing you expected would be simple, but wasn’t?

4. Tell us about a recent support interaction—did resolving it require more effort than you anticipated?

5. Where in our workflow do you feel you waste the most time?

6. If you could eliminate a single inconvenience in our product, what would it be?

7. What extra steps did you have to take to get your job done today?

8. When was the last time our product “just worked” and saved you time?

9. Was there anything confusing or unintuitive in your recent experience?

10. What could we do to make your day-to-day workflow easier?

Notice how these focus on effort, surprises, and friction points. Open-ended CES questions are most valuable after a product update, a big feature launch, or when you notice churn creeping up and need rich, actionable insights fast.

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for SaaS customer survey about customer effort score (CES)

Single-select multiple-choice questions shine when you need quantifiable data or to break the ice for softer follow-up. For SaaS customers, picking from a shortlist often sparks reflection and nudges people toward sharing more details in subsequent answers. They’re also ideal for comparing metrics over time, especially as 60% of service organizations now actively track CES. [3]

Question: How easy was it to accomplish your goal today using our product?

• Very easy

• Somewhat easy

• Neutral

• Somewhat difficult

• Very difficult

Question: Where did you encounter the most friction in your workflow?

• Finding features

• Data entry

• Collaboration

• Integrations

• Other

Question: How would you rate the level of effort required to get help or support?

• Minimal effort

• Moderate effort

• Significant effort

• I didn’t use support

When to follow up with "why?" If you spot a negative or ambiguous reply (“Somewhat difficult,” for example), always follow up. Ask why they answered that way, what specifically felt hard, or what they hoped would have been simpler. This digs past surface scores and reveals root causes you can fix—fast.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Always include “Other” for workflow, feature, or friction questions. You’ll catch edge cases your options missed and open the door for surprise insights via an open-text follow-up.

Should you use an NPS question for SaaS customer survey about customer effort score (CES)?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures willingness to recommend your product on a 0–10 scale. It’s not a replacement for CES—but combining NPS with effort-based questions is a SaaS best practice. Why? It reveals whether customer struggles are affecting loyalty, and it lets you correlate effort reduction with increases in promoter scores.

For instant results, you can auto-generate an NPS survey for SaaS customer CES using Specific’s AI—the best way to tie effort reduction to business growth.

The power of follow-up questions

Open or closed, the only way to dig into ambiguous answers is with smart follow-ups. We’ve written a lot about automated followup questions—and honestly, nothing beats conversational AI for drilling down in real time. With Specific, AI asks context-aware follow-ups instantly, extracting richer insights and saving you from endless email chains or “just one more call” rounds.

• SaaS customer: “It took a while to synchronize my data.”

• AI follow-up: “Which part of the data sync process felt slow or confusing?”

• SaaS customer: “Finding user permissions was difficult.”

• AI follow-up: “Can you tell us what made the permission settings difficult to find? Was it the navigation or unclear labels?”

How many followups to ask? Usually, 2–3 is plenty—enough to clarify details without overwhelming the respondent. Specific lets you control this so you never push too hard; respondents can always skip ahead once you have what you need.

This makes it a conversational survey. Each follow-up keeps the feedback flowing and natural, not robotic. You learn more, and they feel truly heard—win-win.

AI analysis of open-ended responses. Even with messy, unstructured answers, Specific’s AI survey response analysis makes it simple to summarize and categorize everything. Don’t fear the long answers—AI makes them all actionable. Read about how easy it is to analyze CES survey responses using AI here.

These AI-powered followups are a game-changer—try building a survey and see how much more context you collect, without manual back-and-forth.

How to prompt ChatGPT (or any GPT) to generate great SaaS customer CES questions

AI-driven survey builders work best when you give them strong, specific prompts. Here’s how to get started:

Start with this:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for SaaS customer survey about customer effort score (CES).

For better results, add context about your audience, their goals, challenges, or a scenario:

We’re building a survey for SaaS customers who recently upgraded to our Pro plan. Our goal is to understand where they experience friction and what could simplify their workflow. Suggest 10 open-ended questions to measure customer effort score.

Once you have a batch of questions, you can organize them:

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

Now, pick the categories that matter to you. Go deeper:

Generate 10 questions about onboarding hurdles and in-app support, focusing on specifics for SaaS customers.

This iterative prompt-tuning works in Specific’s AI survey generator as well: you tell it exactly what you want, clarify the audience, and it outputs a best-practice survey with built-in follow-ups.

What is a conversational survey?

A conversational survey simulates a chat between you and your SaaS customers, rather than a stale web form. Each answer shapes the flow—AI can adapt questions, clarify intent, and ask for details, just like a smart interviewer. This dynamic is fundamental to collecting nuanced feedback on customer effort score.

Let’s compare how AI survey generation differs from the manual approach:

Why use AI for SaaS customer surveys? You dramatically reduce your survey-building workload and get higher-quality insights. By capturing real-time context, conversational AI surveys spot root causes that static forms miss. When 94% of customers with low-effort experiences repurchase, optimizing CES through smarter surveys pays off. [1]

If you want to dig deeper into building your first conversational survey, check the guide on how to create a survey for customer effort score and explore Specific’s AI survey editor for fast, flexible updates as your product evolves.

Specific is purpose-built to make the process of collecting and analyzing feedback engaging for both the survey creator and the respondent—delivering frictionless, actionable insights every time you run a CES conversational survey.

See this customer effort score (CES) survey example now

Supercharge your feedback process: use conversational AI surveys to discover what really matters to your SaaS customers and unlock actionable insights with minimal setup. Start creating your own survey now and experience smarter, more dynamic conversations that drive growth.