Building a conversational survey is fundamentally different from creating traditional forms—it's about crafting an AI-powered conversation that adapts to each respondent.
This article walks through the entire process of building and launching conversational surveys in Specific, from the initial prompt to analyzing responses.
Whether you need an AI survey for product feedback, lead qualification, or quantitative research, the process is straightforward.
Start with a prompt: The AI survey generator
Instead of tediously constructing questions one by one, you simply chat with an AI survey builder. It's like collaborating with an expert survey designer who converts your ideas into a structured survey on the spot. With the AI survey generator, you explain what you want, and the AI handles the rest.
Here are some example prompts for different use cases:
Product Feedback: Gather nuanced feedback from users on your latest product iteration.
Design a conversational survey to understand how users feel about the new mobile app update, focusing on usability and missing features.
Lead Qualification: Save time by pre-qualifying leads before scheduling calls.
Create an AI-driven survey for incoming sales leads that asks about company size, budget, and current pain points to qualify prospects automatically.
Employee Satisfaction: Uncover what really matters to your people.
Generate an employee satisfaction survey with open questions to explore workplace culture, career development needs, and suggestions for improvement.
The AI leverages a vast base of knowledge and best practices to ensure the surveys it generates are targeted, unbiased, and effective—often outperforming most manual designs.
Complex surveys made simple: If you want to create a comprehensive survey with intricate logic or many questions, this method is a massive time-saver. You describe the goal, and the AI structures every section, branching, and follow-up—no dragging and dropping fields for hours.
Configure AI follow-ups for deeper insights
Each question in Specific can have dynamic AI-generated follow-up questions. These aren’t basic, rigid probes—they behave like a skilled interviewer, asking “why” when needed, clarifying ambiguous responses, or exploring specific use cases based on what the respondent says. To see how this works, check out the automatic AI follow-up questions feature.
You can customize:
Follow-up intensity: Set how persistently the AI should drill down for details.
Maximum depth: Limit how many follow-up turns per question.
Specific instructions: Guide the AI to avoid certain topics or prioritize relevant areas.
For example, on an NPS question (“On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend us?”), an answer of “9” triggers a friendly probe about what stood out, while a “5” gets a more investigative follow-up about friction points.
These follow-ups transform static forms into real conversational surveys, surfacing richer narratives behind every response.
Static surveys | Conversational surveys |
|---|---|
Asks fixed questions regardless of answer | Adapts follow-ups to each response, probing for context |
Limited qualitative depth | Extracts motivation, clarification, and authentic voices |
Impersonal and linear | Feels like a chat with a real person |
Implementing these follow-up patterns pays off—conversational surveys have completion rates of 73% compared to just 33% for traditional surveys [1].
Choose your delivery method: In-product widget or landing page
You have two flexible options for sharing your conversational survey: embedding it in your product as a widget, or distributing it as a standalone landing page.
In-product conversational surveys: These surveys appear as a branded chat widget inside your app, website, or SaaS. You get advanced targeting—show the widget to specific user segments, trigger after certain actions, or time the survey for optimal moments. Learn more on the in-product conversational survey page.
Survey landing pages: Share a unique URL with your audience in emails, Slack, or newsletters. Great for one-off feedback rounds, public polls, or collecting input from people not signed into your app. Visit Conversational Survey Pages for details and examples.
In-product surveys | Landing page surveys |
|---|---|
Best for live SaaS, apps, logged-in users | For external respondents, emails, or community |
Behavior-based targeting and triggers | No-code, instant sharing with anyone |
Context-aware feedback | Accessible outside your core product |
Advanced targeting: You can refine targeting controls by combining user properties, actions, or time spent. This helps avoid “survey fatigue,” showing the right survey to the right person at the right time.
The upshot: these delivery options, paired with robust targeting, are part of why conversational surveys see 25-40% response rates vs 8-12% for classic surveys [1].
The respondent experience: Natural AI conversations
From the respondent’s side, everything feels like a smooth chat. The AI agent asks questions in a conversational, friendly, or professional tone—your choice. You can even run surveys in multiple languages with automatic detection, capturing feedback authentically from global users.
Unlike static forms, the AI adapts in real time. If a respondent needs clarification or brings up important details mid-survey, the AI will dig deeper on its own. You close with a thoughtful ending message, and you can let the conversation continue for more spontaneous insights.
Higher engagement rates: Respondents stay engaged longer and share richer feedback when it feels like a two-way exchange, not a checkbox exercise. Conversational AI experiences, like Microsoft’s Copilot, have driven 73% higher click-through rates and 16% stronger conversion rates [3]. Specific is built with these principles, delivering best-in-class user experience in the conversational survey space—something both you and your respondents will actually enjoy.
This natural interaction, plus instant adaptability, leads to more honest, detailed responses and, ultimately, better data quality for you to work with.
Extract insights: Chat with AI about your responses
Analysis is where Specific comes into its own. Once your AI survey starts collecting results, GPT-based AI immediately summarizes themes and individual answers. The AI survey response analysis tool lets you interact with your data the same way you’d chat with ChatGPT—only here, it’s your user feedback, not generic knowledge.
You can ask:
What are the most common reasons for customer churn?
Which features do users request most often?
How do respondents from different segments rate our onboarding experience?
What sentiment trends are we seeing among power users versus new signups?
Multiple team members can spin up their own analysis threads, each exploring a different research angle—no exports or spreadsheets needed. Here are example analysis prompts to get started:
Identify key pain points
Summarize the main reasons users said they would not recommend our product.
Segment by response type
Compare feedback from users on free vs. paid plans—what themes emerge?
This approach replaces slow, manual coding of qualitative data with AI that can process up to 1,000 comments per second, empowering your team to make decisions quickly [2]. Plus, AI-powered surveys can achieve 95% accuracy in sentiment analysis—dramatically better than human-driven spreadsheet tagging [2].
Launch your first conversational survey
Launching is simple:
Prompt: Describe your survey goal (“Understand reasons for recent churn from new users”) and let the AI assemble the structure.
Customize: Adjust questions, set follow-up depth, and personalize the tone.
Set delivery: Choose in-product widget or share a landing page link.
Launch: Go live and start collecting richer insights.
Here are prompt-writing best practices: be clear about your audience, the insights you need, and potential branching logic. Use the AI survey editor for any tweaks after creation—just describe the change, and the AI updates your survey instantly.
If you feel stuck, try an expert-made template tailored to your use case—they’re a great way to jumpstart your first deployment.
Iterate based on insights: Each batch of responses uncovers new questions and patterns. Use your initial findings to refine future surveys or dive deeper into the areas that matter most. If you’re not running conversational surveys, you’re missing out on faster, higher-quality feedback and risks you won’t detect through old-school forms.
Ready to build your conversational survey?
Transform how you collect and analyze feedback with AI-powered, conversational surveys. Get deeper insights, higher engagement, and actionable data. Go create your own survey today!