This article will guide you on how to create a SaaS customer survey about onboarding experience—fast. With Specific, you can easily build these surveys in seconds using AI-powered tools that work smarter, not harder.
Steps to create a survey for SaaS customers about onboarding experience
If you want to save time, just generate a survey with Specific right now with one click. Here’s all it takes:
Tell what survey you want.
Done.
No need to overthink this. You don’t even need to keep reading—AI handles it from here, bringing expert-level survey design and automated follow-up questions that unlock deep, actionable insights. Try it instantly with any semantic survey use case on the AI survey generator.
Why SaaS customer onboarding experience surveys matter
Let’s be clear: collecting feedback on the onboarding experience is more than helpful—it’s critical to your business’s bottom line. If you’re not running these surveys, you’re missing out on concrete revenue growth and loyalty improvements. For example:
Companies with structured onboarding processes experience a 60% improvement in annual revenue. That is a serious difference, and a direct result of investing in understanding your customer’s first experience. [1]
A well-designed onboarding experience can increase customer retention by 50%. Retention is your software’s lifeblood. [2]
Still, many SaaS businesses put off surveying until churn becomes a problem. That’s risky. With well-crafted onboarding feedback surveys, you uncover:
Pain points that block successful onboarding
Common areas of confusion in your product
Opportunities to delight new customers right away
According to industry research, 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a superior onboarding experience—that’s a massive incentive to listen. [1] Ignoring onboarding feedback is leaving money on the table and risking future growth. The benefits of SaaS customer feedback cannot be overstated.
What makes a good survey on onboarding experience?
There’s a difference between surveys that get ignored and those that bring you a flood of honest, useful responses.
First, clear, unbiased questions are essential. If your survey asks loaded or confusing questions, you’ll get unreliable data. Use a conversational tone so respondents feel comfortable sharing real opinions—not what they think you want to hear. The importance of well-structured onboarding experience surveys can’t be emphasized enough.
Here’s a quick look at best practices:
Bad practices | Good practices |
|---|---|
Leading questions | Neutral, simple language |
The true measures of a good survey are quantity and quality of responses. You want as many participants as possible (quantity), but you also want depth and honesty in the feedback (quality). When both are high, you get insights you can trust—and act on fast.
Question types for SaaS customer survey about onboarding experience
It’s not just what you ask—it’s how you ask it. The best SaaS customer onboarding experience surveys blend a few question types for rich, actionable feedback.
Open-ended questions let customers express themselves fully, revealing insights you can’t get from checkboxes. They work best when you genuinely want to learn about perceptions or problems you haven’t imagined:
What part of our onboarding experience surprised you the most?
If you could change one thing about the way you got started, what would it be?
Single-select multiple-choice questions make analyzing trends quick and easy. Perfect for measuring which resources helped most, or when you want standardized data. Example:
Which piece of onboarding content was most helpful to you?
Product tour video
Written getting started guide
Live demo session
None of the above
NPS (Net Promoter Score) question is ideal for benchmarking customer sentiment and quickly spotting unhappy users. You can instantly generate an NPS survey tailored to SaaS onboarding. This kind of question is simple but powerful:
On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product after your onboarding experience?
Followup questions to uncover "the why": Some of the most actionable survey insights come from intelligent, real-time follow-ups that probe deeper when an answer is unclear or interesting. Want to understand what led to a low NPS score, or why a customer missed a key step? That’s when follow-ups are invaluable. Specific’s surveys automate this process:
What held you back from completing all the onboarding steps?
Can you give an example of a confusing part of the setup process?
For a full list of best questions and expert tips for SaaS customer onboarding surveys, check out our deeper guide with more examples and practical advice on creating them.
What is a conversational survey?
A conversational survey transforms feedback collection into a two-way, chat-like process, rather than a cold, static form. This means your questions feel more like a helpful dialogue—resulting in higher engagement, faster completion, and more thoughtful answers. Traditional surveys are clunky: click, next, click, done. AI-generated surveys turn every question, clarification, and follow-up into a friendly, guided chat.
Manual surveys | AI-generated surveys |
|---|---|
Static, one-size-fits-all | Conversational and adaptive |
Why use AI for SaaS customer surveys? AI survey generators lift the heavy weight off your shoulders. They draw from industry knowledge and proven best practices to generate better question sets, more engaging follow-ups, and eliminate the grunt work. With a tool like Specific, you get a genuine conversational experience for both respondent and survey creator. If you want to see a step-by-step guide on building a survey, check our article on creating an AI conversational survey.
Specific stands apart with best-in-class usability: seamless, natural AI survey experiences that feel like a genuine conversation. For people tired of boring forms, it’s a huge leap forward.
The power of follow-up questions
Let’s talk about what happens when surveys use smart, automated follow-ups. The benefit is obvious: you get clearer reasons, actionable context, and deeper customer understanding. With automatic AI followup questions, you can instantly dig deeper on a customer’s response—no chasing people over email, no guessing about vague replies. Here’s what it can look like:
SaaS Customer: "The setup was tricky."
AI follow-up: "Can you share which specific part felt most tricky or confusing for you?"
How many followups to ask? You want to strike a balance. Usually, 2–3 follow-ups are enough—just enough to clarify or uncover detail, without making things tedious. With Specific, you can fine-tune this, and even let the respondent skip ahead when you’ve gathered what you need.
This makes it a conversational survey, not a rigid questionnaire. AI followups convert feedback into real conversation—people open up more and stay engaged.
AI survey response analysis is easy—even for hundreds of open-ended replies. With Specific, just chat with AI about your survey results, or see insights automatically summarized. If you want to dive into the details, our article on analyzing SaaS customer feedback with AI will get you started.
This approach to follow-up questions is genuinely new. Give it a shot—generate a survey and see the difference firsthand. The quality of your feedback will jump immediately.
See this onboarding experience survey example now
Ready to upgrade how you gather onboarding feedback? Create your own survey now for smart, conversational insights that unlock real SaaS growth.