Here are some of the best questions for a SaaS customer survey about performance, plus our favorite tips for crafting better surveys. If you want a shortcut, you can build a survey in seconds with Specific’s AI.
Best open-ended questions for SaaS customer survey about performance
Open-ended questions are your main tool for unlocking detailed, honest feedback. They give your customers space to voice what matters most, reveal pain points you’d never spot with a multiple-choice grid, and help you uncover patterns you’d otherwise miss. Use them when you want rich, narrative insight—but remember, open-ended answers can require more effort for participants and more care to analyze. Still, the payoff is worth it: open questions regularly lead to more informative responses that help you improve your SaaS product’s performance. [1]
What’s the biggest challenge you face when using our product?
How does our software’s speed and reliability compare to what you expect?
Can you share a time when the product performed exceptionally well for your needs?
Have you ever experienced delays or technical problems? Tell us what happened.
What would you change or improve most urgently about our performance?
Are there specific features you find fast or slow? Which ones?
When (if ever) have you been frustrated by our product’s loading times?
What’s your perception of our product’s uptime and availability?
Is there anything in the product’s performance that surprised you (good or bad)?
What could we do to make your experience with our SaaS product smoother?
Best single-select multiple-choice questions for SaaS customer survey about performance
Single-select multiple-choice questions are best used when you want to quantify common experiences or quickly guide a conversation. Some SaaS customers might hesitate at broad questions, but give them bold, clear choices and you’ll often get more precise, actionable data. Multiple choice is ideal for measuring performance benchmarks—then, you can follow up with open-ended questions for color or clarification.
Question: How would you rate our software’s overall performance?
Excellent
Good
Average
Poor
Question: How often do you experience slowdowns or outages?
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Frequently
Question: When do you notice our product responds slowest?
During peak hours
While using specific features
Randomly
Other
When to follow up with "why?" After a customer selects an option—say, “Sometimes” for slowdowns—ask a quick “Why?” or “Can you share an example?” That’s the moment to dig for context: maybe their location, a particular workflow, or usage pattern reveals the underlying issue.
When and why to add the "Other" choice? “Other” is perfect when you can’t predict every possible scenario. It invites SaaS customers to specify unique cases and, with a follow-up question, you’ll capture the unexpected feedback that leads to real product breakthroughs.
NPS survey: why it matters for SaaS performance feedback
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple, proven way to measure customer loyalty and gauge satisfaction. For SaaS customer surveys about performance, NPS is a natural fit—it’s one question (“How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?”) that’s tightly linked to your product’s reliability and speed. High NPS generally signals strong performance; dips suggest pain points that need urgent attention. Plus, NPS follow-ups help clarify why somebody is (or isn’t) a promoter. You can quickly generate an NPS performance survey for your SaaS customers on Specific.
The power of follow-up questions
Follow-up questions are where a survey moves from “check the box” to true conversation. Specific’s automatic follow-up feature lets your survey operate like a smart researcher, instantly asking the next “why?” or “Can you clarify?” based on what the user just said. That’s why surveys built with Specific feel like a real dialogue—they collect richer, more complete stories, without the hassle of endless emails or phone calls. Research shows that open feedback and timely follow-ups substantially improve the quality of responses [3].
SaaS customer: “Sometimes the dashboard takes a while to load.”
AI follow-up: “Can you tell me more about when these delays usually happen? Is it during certain hours or after you’ve done a particular action?”
How many followups to ask? In most cases, 2–3 tailored follow-up questions are enough. Specific’s own survey logic makes this easy—you can set the maximum depth, or let the AI skip ahead once it has enough context. A couple of smart probes will usually uncover the full story, without ever fatiguing the user.
This makes it a conversational survey—every answer leads naturally into the next, putting the customer’s experience front and center.
Easy result analysis, even with lots of text responses—That’s where AI shines. Analyzing responses from SaaS customer survey about performance is almost effortless with Specific’s built-in tools. Even with pages of unstructured open-ended feedback, the AI quickly surfaces trends, clusters topics, and highlights outliers for manual review.
Try generating a survey with automatic follow-ups and see how it deepens the conversation.
How to write a great prompt for ChatGPT or GPT-4 to generate SaaS performance survey questions
Start simple. Your first ChatGPT prompt could be:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for SaaS customer survey about performance.
The AI works even better when you give it details about your company, the type of users, and what you want to learn. Here’s a richer example:
We’re a B2B SaaS company with global customers. Our survey should help identify what slows down the product, what features feel laggy, and how our performance stacks up to expectations. Suggest 10 open-ended questions focused on uncovering actionable performance feedback, including prompts for follow-up if users mention specific problems.
Next, get organized:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
Once you have the categories (“Speed,” “Reliability,” “Feature performance”), you can prompt the AI with:
Generate 10 questions specifically for the “Reliability” and “Speed” categories.
What is a conversational survey?
Conversational surveys are a big upgrade from dreary old forms. Instead of static fields, a conversational survey powered by AI (like Specific) feels like a natural discussion: questions adapt to previous answers, tone shifts based on context, and participants feel heard—not processed. The result? People stay engaged longer, answer honestly, and complete more surveys through interactive chat, especially when delivered inside an app or via a friendly landing page.
Take a look at the difference:
Manual Survey | AI-Generated Conversational Survey |
|---|---|
Static questions in a fixed order | Dynamic, adaptive follow-ups in real-time |
Easy to miss context or nuances | AI clarifies unclear answers instantly |
Analysis often takes days or weeks | Immediate summaries and insights with AI |
Can feel impersonal and tedious | Feels like a chat—mobile-friendly and quick |
Why use AI for SaaS customer surveys? It shortens setup time, asks smarter questions for every new respondent, and makes sure you never miss an insight. See how you can create a survey in minutes—no research background required. Whether you’re sampling 10 or 10,000 users, an AI survey example from Specific blends expert technique with instant analysis and conversational user experience.
Specific offers the best-in-class conversational surveys available—making feedback not just easy to gather, but a pleasure for your SaaS customers to give (and for you to analyze).
See this performance survey example now
Get actionable insights in minutes—see how a conversational survey about performance lets you capture high-quality feedback and never miss the why behind your metrics.