This article will guide you on how to create a customer survey about onboarding experience. At Specific, we make it easy for anyone to build a high-quality survey in seconds using AI that understands your needs.
Steps to create a survey for customers about onboarding experience
If you want to save time, just generate a survey with Specific. Here’s how simple it is with AI-powered conversational surveys:
Tell what survey you want.
Done.
You honestly don’t even need to read further. The AI will create the survey, leveraging expert knowledge—and it even asks respondents follow-up questions to gather the most insightful feedback. See more at our AI survey generator.
Why onboarding experience surveys matter
It’s tempting to think onboarding is just a box to check, but the data says otherwise. For example, companies with a structured onboarding process experience a 50% increase in customer retention [1]. If you’re not running these, you’re missing out on:
Spotting friction points before they become churn risks
Learning what delights (or frustrates) newcomers
Detecting confusion early—before it turns into silent attrition
Surveys on onboarding experience aren’t a “nice to have”—they’re mission-critical. The benefits of customer feedback are real: 86% of customers say they’ll remain loyal if there’s proper onboarding and education [1]. If you wait for support tickets or product returns, it’s too late.
Missed onboarding insights mean missed revenue. High-touch onboarding can lead to 7.4% more revenue in only 18 months [1]. That’s the importance of customer recognition surveys embedded in your journey.
What makes a good survey on onboarding experience
The best onboarding surveys have clear, unbiased questions and a conversational tone, encouraging customers to give honest, meaningful responses. A dry form won’t cut it—your customers are human, and your survey should connect on that level to reveal the real story.
You want both the quantity of responses (high completion rates) and the quality (detailed, useful answers) to be high. That’s how you know your onboarding feedback loop is strong. Here’s a quick comparison to keep you on track:
Bad practices | Good practices |
|---|---|
Leading or confusing wording | Neutral, open phrasing |
One-size-fits-all tone | Conversational, customer-focused language |
No follow-up questions | Dynamic probing for deeper insights |
Too long, complicated | Bite-sized, clear questions |
Types of questions for customer surveys about onboarding experience
Different question formats serve different purposes when designing surveys for onboarding experience. Here’s how you should mix them for maximum value:
Open-ended questions: These capture nuance, letting customers express what’s on their minds in their own words. Great for uncovering surprises or problems you didn’t think to ask. Use them when you want genuine stories and not just scores or checkboxes.
What was the most confusing part of getting started with our product?
How could we improve your onboarding experience?
Single-select multiple-choice questions help you quantify responses and spot trends fast. They’re best when you already know the possible answers and want structured data.
Which part of the onboarding process was most helpful for you?
Product tour
Welcome email
Live demo
Help center articles
NPS (Net Promoter Score) question is essential for tracking overall sentiment. Use it near the end of the onboarding period to measure satisfaction and identify both promoters and detractors. You can generate a tailored NPS onboarding survey here.
On a scale from 0–10, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague after your onboarding experience?
Followup questions to uncover “the why” can turn superficial answers into actionable insights. Whenever a response is vague (“It was fine.”), a followup like “Can you tell me more about what you liked or didn’t like?” brings out key details. Use these especially after NPS or multi-choice questions when you need to understand the reasoning.
Can you explain what made the onboarding feel confusing?
What would have improved your first experience with our product?
If you want to explore more best questions for customer onboarding surveys (or see examples and expert tips), this guide covers the most insightful options.
What is a conversational survey?
A conversational survey feels like a chat—not a stuffy form. Instead of giving people a rigid list, we create an interactive, AI-driven back-and-forth. This makes customers feel heard, not processed, so you get richer responses.
Compare this to building a traditional survey by hand, which is slow, dull, and often produces mediocre insights. With an AI survey generator, the system asks follow-up questions like a real person and automatically rephrases unclear answers, making sure nothing important slips through. Here’s a quick look at the difference:
Manual surveys | AI-generated surveys |
|---|---|
Static, one-size-fits-all | Adaptive conversations |
Slow to build and edit | Created or updated in seconds via AI |
No dynamic followups | On-the-fly probing questions |
More dropouts and half-answers | Higher response quality and completion |
Why use AI for customer surveys? Because it’s smarter, it adapts in real time, and it removes the guesswork. When you use an AI survey example built with Specific, the conversation is as natural as texting a colleague. This makes the process smoother for both creators and respondents—no tedious editing or manual scripting needed.
Curious about the details? See our in-depth article on how to create a survey and what sets our conversational approach apart.
The power of follow-up questions
Anyone who’s run a customer survey knows that initial answers are rarely the full story. That’s where automated follow-up questions (see automatic AI followup questions for more info) come in. Asking smart, context-aware followups is a game changer for gathering detailed feedback. Specific’s AI can react to any vague or incomplete answer in real time, just like a product expert or UX researcher would, but at scale.
Followups replace the endless back-and-forth of chasing detail via email—and they make the conversation feel genuine instead of forced. Consider the difference:
Customer: “It was a bit confusing at first.”
AI follow-up: “Can you share which part was most confusing, or how we could have made it easier?”
How many followups to ask? In most cases, two to three thoughtful followups will yield deep context—enough for robust insight. You don’t want to overwhelm, though, so enabling the option to skip to the next question is best practice. Specific lets you fine-tune this, balancing depth and brevity.
This makes it a conversational survey: engaging, dynamic, and much more enjoyable for your customer—leading to better, more honest answers.
AI analysis, quick theme detection, and zero spreadsheet pain: Don’t worry about having lots of unstructured answers. Our AI tools (see AI survey response analysis) make it easy to summarize and filter, so you can spot patterns without any manual coding or sorting.
This approach is still new, so give it a try—generate your own survey, and see how a few followup questions can deliver game-changing insight.
See this onboarding experience survey example now
Ready for clear, actionable feedback? Create your own survey and start getting insights that drive better onboarding and higher customer loyalty—thanks to smarter conversations, smarter AI, and the unbeatable experience Specific brings to customer research.