Self-service options have made things easier for customers. These days, they can sign up for a product and start using it without any human interaction. This process is what most customers want, and it allows businesses to sell their products 24/7. What's not to like?
Well, there is one small thing.
Frictionless customer onboarding is excellent. It saves everyone a lot of time and effort. However, not having human discussions or interactions means you can lose some helpful information.
For example, you can't always find out about your customer's preferences or objectives with your products when you don’t speak to them. On top of that, you can also lose the ability to get feedback on a wide range of issues, including the customer onboarding process itself.
So, how can you provide the customer experience your prospective users want and get the feedback you need to improve your onboarding experience and your product?
The answer is by using a customer onboarding survey.
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What is a customer onboarding survey?
A customer onboarding survey is a way to collect data on the onboarding process. These short and sharp questionnaires can give you valuable insights into the customer experience, specifically your onboarding process.
In short, surveys help you improve the user onboarding experience. Adopting these tools can help the commercial performance of your app by giving you the data you need to understand your customers and their journey with your product. This process can boost customer retention and, ultimately, customer loyalty.
Why do you need a customer onboarding survey?
There are lots of reasons why a customer onboarding survey is essential. Here are a few compelling reasons.
#1. Measure your onboarding flow
You can never have enough information on your customer onboarding flow. A survey helps you add qualitative data to more quantitative metrics.
#2. Perfect the buyer journey
Customer onboarding is an essential aspect of the buyer journey. A customer onboarding survey helps you gather actionable insights for improving this stage. Additionally, you can use a survey to find out how they downloaded or found your app, which can strengthen your customer acquisition process.
#3. Personalization
You can use your customer onboarding survey to gather data about user preferences. This information can be about their goals and objectives within the app, communication preferences, and more.
#4. Remove friction
Providing a great customer experience is about removing friction. You can ask your users which elements required too much effort or where they felt they needed additional guidance.
#5. Reduce time to value
The information you collect from a customer onboarding survey means you can gather feedback about how users engage with your product. You can use this data to improve your onboarding and your product, helping users reduce time to value and enhance your activation rate.
#6. Boost customer retention
Good onboarding leads to a better customer experience. You only get one chance to make a great first impression, but when you do, you can boost your customer retention rates.
Customer onboarding survey best practices
OK, now that you know what a customer onboarding survey is and why they're important, let's establish some best practices for customer onboarding surveys.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind when designing your customer onboarding survey.
#1. In-app surveys have higher response rates
Ask your survey questions in-app if you want higher response rates. Time them well, and make them short, and users will be happy to oblige.
#2. Prioritize quantitative questions, but use a blend of open-ended questions too
Short, punchy CSAT or NPS questions are easier to answer and will get more responses. That said, there is a case to be made for open-ended questions in the right context. So look for a good blend of the two.
#3. Pick your spots
Space out your questions at the right time during the onboarding journey. It will stop your users from being overwhelmed, and the questions can relate to the experiences they just had.
What questions to include in your customer onboarding survey?
The best way to plan customer onboarding surveys is to think about what information you need.
Below, we've categorized the questions into different groups. This list includes a mix of scale or Likert questions, with some open-ended questions to help you collect more qualitative data.
Customer data
Collecting customer data has become more complex since GDPR and the iOS 14 update. The signup process offers a valuable opportunity to collect first-party customer data, especially for brands that offer product demos.
Beyond these commercial considerations, the signup process is a good time to go deeper into the information you collect. Some of the benefits of grabbing this information include providing great personalization, a fuller understanding of your customers, and collecting data that can improve how you market your product.
Here are a few questions that you can try:
How did you hear about our product?
How large is your organization?
What is your role at your business?
Are you the decision maker for purchasing this product?
Have you tried similar products? If so, which ones?
Who are the primary and secondary contacts within your organization for this product?
Marketing questions
It can be helpful to ask some marketing questions to get a better idea of how your product fits in with your prospect's business model. Some helpful questions to ask include:
What are your brand's overall goals?
Who is your target audience?
Who are your main competitors right now?
Purchase intent questions
These questions are particularly powerful when a user has signed up for a trial of your product. They can help you identify things like whether your product is a good fit for each customer.
What is your main reason for using our product?
What goals or objectives do you need our product to help you solve?
What features are you most excited to use?
Customer experience questions
Customer experience questions are a crucial part of your onboarding survey. While it can be difficult to expect good answers to questions about the quality of your product at this stage, you can access excellent insights into this critical phase of the buyer journey.
Creating a solid onboarding flow is an ongoing task that is never really complete. Even minor, iterative gains can improve your customer onboarding and help you convert more users.
Here are some questions you can ask to power these improvements. While we've used scales of 1-5 for some of these questions, you can substitute them with 1-10 or dissatisfied-satisfaction, and so on:
On a scale of 1-5, how easy did you find it to sign up?
How can we improve our signup process and make it more accessible?
How satisfied are you with our product so far?
How do you rate our product on a scale of 1-5?
How likely are you to recommend our product to friends or family on a scale of 1-10?
Please rate your overall onboarding experience between 1-5.
Product questions
While an early impression of your product won't always give you comprehensive feedback, that's not really the point. Creating a strong early impression is essential because there is so much choice out there that if you can't offer immediate value, you'll lose prospects before they become paying customers.
Getting feedback about the early impression of your product, can you design an effective onboarding flow, improve your messaging, and even improve your product.
Here are some helpful questions to ask:
What do you like about the product?
What do you dislike about the product?
How easy was the product to use on a scale of 1-5?
How helpful did you find <insert feature> on a scale of 1-5?
Did you feel like you had enough information to get started quickly with our product?
On a scale of 1-5, how easy was it to achieve your goal with our product?
What metrics will you use to measure how successful this product is for your goals and objectives?
What would you change about our product?
Conditional questions
Having a general set of questions is essential. However, where possible, a short survey following specific interactions is critical. For example, if your user interacts with customer service, you can ask them about their experiences. Some good examples here are:
Rate your customer support help between 1-5.
How easy was it to find the information you needed between 1-5?
How responsive was our customer support on a scale of 1-5?
What are your preferred channels for customer support?
How Usetiful can help with your customer onboarding survey
Usetiful can now help you collect feedback with powerful in-app surveys. Providing questions inside the app leads to higher response rates. What's more, you can connect the survey to your CRM or other analytics tools via webhooks, allowing you to make the most of your feedback.
Follow this guide for how to create an NPS survey within Usetiful. Soon, you'll have a wealth of data that you can use to power customer retention and improve the overall customer experience.
Asking questions is the best way to improve your product, customer success, and your onboarding process. By adding in-app survey capabilities, Usetiful has made that process far easier.