This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from a SaaS customer survey about onboarding experience. If you want to turn feedback into actionable insights, you‘re in the right place.
Choosing the right tools for survey response analysis
The best approach—and the right tools—depend on the form and structure of your survey data. Here’s how I break it down:
Quantitative data: If you’re working with numbers (like how many SaaS customers chose “Very satisfied” or selected a feature), Excel or Google Sheets handle the basics. You can quickly tally up selections and calculate percentages.
Qualitative data: For open-ended responses, stories, or follow-up conversations, manual reading just doesn’t cut it at scale. This is where AI tools come in—they sift through thousands of comments and highlight what matters most.
When you’re ready to dive into qualitative responses, you essentially have two main options for tooling:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
You can export your SaaS customer onboarding survey data—such as a CSV or text dump—and copy it into ChatGPT. This lets you chat about the customer responses, test prompts, and look for core ideas.
The downsides? It’s a bit clunky. You’ll likely hit context size limits with larger surveys, and keeping track of follow-ups or segmenting responses by customer type gets time-consuming. You also need to massage the data to keep the conversation focused and relevant.
All-in-one tool like Specific
If you want an AI tool built specifically for survey work, tools like Specific streamline the entire process. I like to think of these tools as running both the collection and analysis phases—everything stays in one place.
Contextual follow-up: Specific automatically asks personalized follow-up questions during interviews, so you get richer, more actionable onboarding insights (see how automatic follow-up questions work for details). This improves the quality of your data before you even start analysis.
AI-powered analysis: When you’re ready, Specific analyzes all survey responses in seconds—summarizing, categorizing, and even letting you chat directly with AI about results. You can ask complex questions (“What are recurring pain points for new users?” or “Which onboarding steps confuse users the most?”) and get structured answers instantly. It’s like having an AI researcher on your team, without any spreadsheets or code to manage.
Data management: Unlike just pasting data into a chatbot, Specific allows you to set filters, organize chats by survey segment, and manage exactly what data the AI should access. This is crucial as SaaS teams often care about insights by user role or onboarding tier.
Useful prompts that you can use to analyze SaaS customer onboarding experience feedback
If you’re diving into analysis—whether in ChatGPT or with an AI survey platform—the right prompts accelerate everything. Here are proven prompt patterns that work especially well for SaaS customer onboarding surveys:
Prompt for core ideas: This is my go-to starting point when I want the big picture. Use this to extract the main themes from all qualitative responses. (This prompt comes standard in Specific but works anywhere):
Your task is to extract core ideas in bold (4-5 words per core idea) + up to 2 sentence long explainer.
Output requirements:
- Avoid unnecessary details
- Specify how many people mentioned specific core idea (use numbers, not words), most mentioned on top
- no suggestions
- no indications
Example output:
1. **Core idea text:** explainer text
2. **Core idea text:** explainer text
3. **Core idea text:** explainer text
Boost accuracy with more context: AI always performs better if you provide additional background—describe your survey, your audience, or your goal. Here’s how I’d expand a core prompt for more precise results:
You are an expert in SaaS customer onboarding. Here are responses from customers about their first-time onboarding experience. My goal is to find where users get confused and which touchpoints drive satisfaction. Extract themes and key pain points as described above.
Prompt for drilling down into a theme: Once you have a list of core ideas, go deeper with follow-ups like:
Tell me more about [core idea]
Prompt for specific topics: Sometimes you just want to quickly check if customers mention something—for example, a feature, documentation, or support:
Did anyone talk about [feature or topic]? Include quotes.
Here are additional prompts I often use for SaaS onboarding surveys, adjusted to fit this audience and topic:
Personas: Identify profiles among new users, power users, and those who churned.
Based on the survey responses, identify and describe a list of distinct personas—similar to how "personas" are used in product management. For each persona, summarize their key characteristics, motivations, goals, and any relevant quotes or patterns observed in the conversations.
Pain points and challenges: Summarize where onboarding caused friction, confusion, or frustration.
Analyze the survey responses and list the most common pain points, frustrations, or challenges mentioned. Summarize each, and note any patterns or frequency of occurrence.
Motivations & drivers: What made some customers persist, and what did they value in the onboarding journey?
From the survey conversations, extract the primary motivations, desires, or reasons participants express for their behaviors or choices. Group similar motivations together and provide supporting evidence from the data.
Sentiment analysis: Separate positive, negative, or neutral onboarding experiences.
Assess the overall sentiment expressed in the survey responses (e.g., positive, negative, neutral). Highlight key phrases or feedback that contribute to each sentiment category.
Unmet needs & opportunities: What could make onboarding dramatically better?
Examine the survey responses to uncover any unmet needs, gaps, or opportunities for improvement as highlighted by respondents.
If you want to go deeper, consider exploring best survey questions for SaaS onboarding experience or try generating a custom survey using our AI survey generator for onboarding experience.
How Specific analyzes qualitative responses by question type
I love how Specific structures qualitative analysis based on the question type. Here’s how it tackles the most common ones you’ll find in SaaS onboarding surveys:
Open-ended questions (with or without follow-ups): You get a robust summary for all responses to the question, plus layered insights from responses to any follow-ups the AI asked. This captures nuance and rising themes directly tied to each area of onboarding.
Single/multi-choice questions with follow-ups: Specific provides a breakdown for each answer choice. For example, if users select “Onboarding is confusing,” their follow-up comments get separately summarized—making it obvious what underlies each response pattern.
NPS questions: Here, the platform groups all feedback by promoters, passives, and detractors. Each category gets its own summary of follow-up responses, helping you understand what delights power users and what frustrates those at risk of churn.
You can achieve similar results in ChatGPT, but be ready for more hands-on work: segmenting data, copy-pasting filtered replies, and manually prompting the AI for each group. That’s why an integrated tool purpose-built for surveys saves so much time—especially when you want to act fast.
How to overcome context size challenges in AI analysis
Large SaaS customer surveys can quickly hit the infamous “context limit” found in most AI tools. If your file has too many responses or long interviews, you can’t fit everything into a single AI prompt. Here’s how I handle it—and how Specific does this out of the box:
Filtering: If you only want to analyze responses from users who replied to a certain question (maybe people who struggled with onboarding), apply filters. Only those conversations will be passed to the AI. This makes working with large datasets practical, ensuring the AI focuses on the most relevant feedback.
Cropping: Sometimes, a targeted deep-dive is all you need. Select only the specific questions you want the AI to look at. By cropping to a manageable set, you stay within the context limit and maximize the value of every AI query.
If you rely on other AI assistants, you’ll need to split and reformat the data manually. With tools designed for survey analysis, like Specific, the process is automated. That means less time fiddling with templates or cleaning CSVs, more time surfacing what actually drives onboarding friction and success. As a data point: 61% of users drop off during onboarding due to complexity or time—so, speed and clarity are non-negotiable if you want to improve customer experience. [1]
Collaborative features for analyzing SaaS customer survey responses
Team collaboration is critical when tackling onboarding feedback—especially in SaaS, where product managers, UX researchers, and customer success pros need to be on the same page. I’ve seen far too many insights get lost in email threads or siloed spreadsheets.
In Specific, analysis is truly collaborative. Instead of just one person running queries, any teammate can chat with the AI about onboarding survey responses. This encourages cross-team discovery—growth can chase upsell triggers, while UX zeroes in on friction points.
Multiple AI chats: You’re not limited to one conversation. Each team member can spin up a new chat, apply their own filters (like segmenting by onboarding tier or by feature set), and see who created which chat at a glance. This avoids duplication and keeps feedback laser-focused on each team’s goals.
Clear authorship: In collaborative chat, every message displays the sender’s avatar—so you always know who had which idea or which prompt unveiled a breakthrough.
If you’re running a SaaS onboarding team, these features keep analysis transparent and iterative—so no important feedback slips through the cracks. For a walk-through of how to set this up, check out our survey creation guide for SaaS onboarding or jump into the Specific survey generator yourself.
Create your SaaS customer survey about onboarding experience now
Turn your onboarding feedback into measurable growth with survey analysis that’s fast, accurate, and collaborative—plus built-in AI prompts and summaries for every question.