This article will guide you on how to create an Inactive Users survey about onboarding experience. With Specific, you can build an AI-powered survey in seconds—no technical hurdles, just actionable insights fast.
Steps to create a survey for inactive users about onboarding experience
If you want to save time, just generate a survey with Specific. Creating surveys with AI is genuinely simple:
Tell what survey you want.
Done.
You don’t even need to read further. AI will create the survey with expert-level onboarding knowledge, and it’ll ask follow-up questions to capture specific insights from your inactive users. If you prefer more manual control or want to explore advanced editing, use the AI survey generator—it handles any audience or topic with just a prompt.
Why surveying inactive users on onboarding experience matters
Running a survey with inactive users about their onboarding experience isn’t just a check-box exercise—it’s a practical way to reconnect, discover friction points, and win back their engagement before they’re gone for good.
Inactive users are often a silent majority. If you ignore their feedback, you miss valuable improvement signals, hidden churn reasons, and easy conversion wins.
Without data from those who “drop off,” you’re optimizing onboarding in the dark. A well-designed feedback loop with your inactive cohort can reveal what’s truly confusing, frustrating, or off-putting.
The impact is clear: **69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experience a great onboarding process** [1]. For customers, it’s similar—**86% are more likely to remain loyal after a positive onboarding experience** [2]. For SaaS and digital products, this is the difference between growth and attrition.
If you’re not running these surveys, you’re letting preventable churn slip through the cracks. Insightful onboarding surveys with semantic, conversational surveys help identify the real barriers and quickly course-correct. In practice, companies with a defined onboarding process see a **50% increase in customer retention** [3]—proof that even small changes, based on real feedback, pay off.
What makes a good survey on onboarding experience?
Let’s cut to it: good onboarding surveys for inactive users aren’t just about “what didn’t work?” They’re crafted to drive honest answers and uncover what will actually bring people back.
Clear, unbiased questions: Avoid leading wording—just dig for what was confusing, missing, or off-putting.
Conversational tone: Sounding like a real human encourages authenticity from respondents. Specific’s chat-style format helps inactive users open up, instead of giving stock answers.
When it comes to the “goodness” of a survey, measure both quantity and quality of feedback. High response rates = you made it frictionless. Rich, actionable answers = you asked the right things. Both must be high to drive improvement.
Bad Practices | Good Practices |
|---|---|
Leading questions (“Did our onboarding confuse you?”) | Neutral prompts (“How would you describe your onboarding experience?”) |
Too many required fields, long forms | Conversational, natural, 1-question-at-a-time flow |
No follow-ups; stop at surface answer | Smart follow-up (“Can you share which part was least helpful?”) |
Smart question types for inactive users surveys about onboarding experience
If you want to go beyond basic forms, designing with the right mix of question types is crucial. Inactive users respond best when surveys feel short, context-aware, and relevant. Here’s how we approach it at Specific:
Open-ended questions are ideal for surfacing unexpected blockers or motivations. They let inactive users vent, explore, or clarify, especially when you pair them with dynamic follow-ups. Consider these:
What was the most confusing part of our onboarding experience for you?
Is there anything that would have encouraged you to complete onboarding?
Single-select multiple-choice questions help structure responses for patterns at scale. Use them to identify common friction points among many users.
Which part of the onboarding did you stop at?
Account setup
Tutorial/demo
Feature tour
I don’t remember
NPS (Net Promoter Score) question is a classic for measuring advocacy. For inactive users, it reveals just how far off you were from “delight.” See how to instantly generate an NPS survey for inactive users—tailored to onboarding experience.
How likely are you to recommend our product to a colleague or friend based on your onboarding experience?
Followup questions to uncover "the why": Whenever a user’s answer is vague (“It was confusing”), good follow-ups clarify and extract the deeper reason. That’s how you get from “meh” to meaningful action.
Why was that part confusing for you?
What could we have done differently to make onboarding easier?
If you want to dig deeper into question design, check out our guide on best questions for inactive user onboarding surveys—it’s packed with practical tips for context-rich surveys that get better answers.
What is a conversational survey?
Conversational surveys mimic a natural back-and-forth chat. Instead of a static list of questions, each answer can trigger clarifying follow-ups, just like a smart interviewer. This approach boosts engagement, reduces survey fatigue, and gathers richer, more honest responses—crucial with inactive users who might never fill out a traditional form.
How does AI survey generation with Specific beat manual survey building?
Manual Survey Creation | AI-Generated with Specific |
|---|---|
Static, script-based; no “reacting” to user | Dynamic follow-ups adapt to each answer in real time |
Time-consuming setup | Ready in seconds with AI-generated expert logic |
Easily miss key insights if not meticulously crafted | Always on-topic, with expert-level question design |
Impersonal (“form fatigue”) | Feels like a live chat—users respond naturally |
Why use AI for inactive users surveys? You instantly unlock expert-built onboarding questions, follow-ups, and analysis—without needing to be a researcher yourself. The AI reads each response, probes for specifics, and adapts on the fly, so you’re not stuck with “one-size-fits-all.” If you’re looking for a detailed AI survey example, try the AI survey generator or preview a template—Specific offers the best in conversational surveys for engagement and analysis alike. If you want to see how easy it is to build a survey step-by-step, check out our comprehensive guide.
The power of follow-up questions
The real edge with conversational surveys? Automated follow-up questions. Instead of settling for shallow feedback, these questions react live to what the user just said, unearthing clarity and actionable next steps. Here’s a deeper dive into how dynamic AI probing works.
Inactive User: “Your onboarding was just okay.”
AI follow-up: “Can you share what would have made it great instead of just okay?”
How many followups to ask? We recommend 2–3 follow-ups per open-ended question to maximize insights, but you can let respondents skip to the next section whenever you hit what you need. Specific’s settings help you tune this for your audience to keep it conversational, not interrogative.
This makes it a conversational survey: Every follow-up feels like a natural next step in a discussion—not a cold script. That’s how you drive both quantity and quality of responses even from disengaged users.
Analyze, summarize, discover themes: Don’t get overwhelmed by raw open text. With AI survey response analysis, it’s easy to chat with your data and surface key patterns, even with lots of in-depth, unstructured user stories. Read how Specific makes survey analysis painless.
Automated follow-up questions are the new gold standard. Try generating your own survey and see how powerful this experience can be—you’ll change how you gather user insights forever.
See this onboarding experience survey example now
Unlock deep, actionable insights from your inactive users with a conversational AI survey tailored to onboarding feedback—gather better responses and start transforming user retention today.