Creating a positive and seamless Customer Onboarding Experience is crucial for making a lasting first impression, promoting customer loyalty, and establishing a strong brand presence.

Congratulations on acquiring a new customer in today's competitive market! But it's not just enough to acquire new customers; it's about making them feel confident that they made the right choice by choosing YOU.

In SaaS or product-led growth businesses, customers usually discover your product on their own, and there is limited interaction between you and your customers until they seek customer support. So, how can you learn about their expectations from you and educate them about your product so the gap between potential customers to paying ones is bridged?  

This is where a well-designed customer onboarding survey comes in. It's the secret sauce to an effective onboarding experience, ensuring a smooth transition for your new customers. With a well-crafted customer onboarding survey, you can guide your customers at every step, ensuring they get the most out of your product and leave positive product feedback.

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With over 90% of customers believing that companies could improve their onboarding process and 86% more likely to stay with you if your onboarding is welcoming and informative, the benefits of a well-made customer onboarding survey are clear.

Whether you have been in the business for long or just started, we have got you covered. So let’s dive into the nuances of implementing a customer onboarding survey that captures the hearts and minds of your customers.

Table of Content

• Customer Onboarding Survey Template
• Customer Onboarding Survey Questions and their Importance
• Why Use Customer Onboarding Survey?
• Customer Onboarding Experience of Leading SaaS Companies
• Best Practices for Implementing Customer Onboarding Survey 
• How Zonka Feedback Translates Your Customer Onboarding Journey into Informed Action?

Customer Onboarding Survey Template

If you want to gauge the effectiveness of your onboarding process for your customers, here's a customer onboarding survey template you can check out.

Customer Onboarding Survey Questions and their Importance

To create a positive customer onboarding experience, it's important to consider various aspects of the process. Gathering feedback about each aspect and taking action based on the feedback can help improve the overall customer experience. Here are some questions to ensure seamless customer onboarding to evaluate different aspects.

1. General Customer Information

General customer information in an onboarding survey provides essential data about the customer that can be used to tailor their experience and improve their satisfaction. It also creates a sense of familiarity with your customers and helps you anticipate their needs and offer relevant solutions. Here are some general onboarding survey questions that you can include in your survey.

• What is your position at the company?
• Which industry do you work in?
• What is the name of your company or organization?
• How did you hear about our product/service?
• Do you have any specific needs or requirements you want us to know?

2. Purchase Intent Questions

Purchase intent questions aim to understand the primary motive behind purchasing the product. These questions can help you understand your customer's level of interest and intention to buy, which is essential for planning and optimizing their sales and marketing efforts. Include these questions in your customer onboarding survey to understand your customer’s purchase intent.

• What other apps did you evaluate before choosing this product?
• Which features compelled you to sign up for our product/service?
• What specific goals do you hope to achieve by using our product/service?
• What factors influenced your decision to purchase our product/service?
• What made you choose our product over similar products?

3. Project-Specific Information

Project-specific questions can help you define the project's scope and ensure that you understand the customer's goals and requirements. It can also help you identify potential risks or challenges that may arise during the project and develop strategies to mitigate them, thereby avoiding project delays, cost overruns, or customer dissatisfaction. Include these project-specific questions to understand your customers' need better.

• What problem are you trying to solve with our app/service?
• What are the potential risks or challenges that you anticipate for this project?
• How will we measure the success of this project or engagement?
• What outcome do you want to achieve with our app/service?
• Is there anything else we should know about the project to ensure its success?

4. Product-Related Questions

Product-specific questions in an onboarding survey help you understand how customers use your product, what features or functions are most valuable, and what areas can be improved. This information can be used to get and optimize product feature requests, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive business growth. Here are some product-specific questions to include in your customer onboarding survey.

• How useful is the product to you on a scale of 1-10?
• Have you experienced any issues when getting started with the product?
• Do you find our product easy to use?
• Rate the usefulness of these features to you. 
• What feature did you expect in the product but did not find? 
• What do you dislike about our product?
• What do you like about our product?

5. Marketing Information

Obtaining marketing information can help you attribute your sales or conversions to specific marketing channels or campaigns and allocate resources accordingly. By understanding what customers respond to best, you can create more targeted and effective campaigns that are more likely to drive conversions. Here are some questions to help you gauge the same.

• What are your company’s goals and vision?
• Who are your main competitors?
• Who is your target audience?
• Did any specific marketing campaigns or promotions influence your decision to make a purchase? If so, which ones?
• Did you find our marketing materials (e.g., website, social media pages, brochures) helpful in understanding our product/service?
• Which marketing channels did you encounter before making a purchase?
  • Social Media Ads
  • Email Marketing
  • Search Engine Ads
  • Others (specify)

6. Overall Customer Satisfaction

Understanding, if your customers are satisfied with your product, should be your top priority. Whether you want your customers to stick for long or identify performance metrics for a better customer experience, your focus should be on seamless customer experience, even during onboarding. Here are some customer satisfaction questions to include in your onboarding survey.

• How satisfied are you with the onboarding experience?
• Did the onboarding process meet your expectations?
• Would you recommend our company to others based on your onboarding experience?
• How would you rate our signup process?
• How could we improve our signup process?
• What can we improve in our onboarding flow?
• Is there anything critical to your success that wasn’t covered during our onboarding process?

7. Onboarding Communication

A smooth onboarding communication helps understand how customers prefer to be communicated with during the onboarding process. This information can be used to identify gaps in the process and tailor communication to specific customer needs and preferences, and ensure that customers feel supported throughout the process.

• How would you rate the communication you received during the onboarding process?
• Was the information provided to you clear and concise?
• Did you feel adequately informed about our product/service after completing the onboarding process
• Did you feel that the communication you received was personalized to your needs and preferences
• Were there any areas where communication could be improved during the onboarding process?

8. Clarity of Process

If the onboarding process is confusing or unclear, it can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction, impacting customer retention. It might also lead customers to reach out to customer support for assistance. This can increase the workload for the customer support representative and longer wait times for customers.

By improving the clarity of the onboarding process, you can improve efficiency and get positive word of mouth and referrals. Include these questions in your customer onboarding survey to gauge the clarity of the onboarding process for customers.

• Did you understand the steps involved in the onboarding process?
• Were the instructions provided easy to follow?
• Did you encounter any issues during the onboarding process?
• Was there anything you wanted to be explained more thoroughly during the onboarding process?
• Was there anything that you found particularly helpful during the onboarding process?
• Would you recommend any changes to the onboarding process to make it clearer or more user-friendly?

9. Timeframe

Questions related to timeframe can help you identify potential bottlenecks in the onboarding process. For example, if customers consistently report that a particular step in the onboarding process takes too long, you can investigate why this step is taking longer than expected and make necessary changes. It will help you understand the customer’s perspective and ensure the onboarding process is not overly long or time-consuming. Consider these questions to add to your customer onboarding survey to gauge the timeframe of the onboarding process.

• How long did it take you to complete the entire onboarding process?
• Was the onboarding process completed within a reasonable timeframe?
• Were there any specific steps or tasks in the onboarding process that took longer than expected?
• Did you receive the necessary information and resources promptly during the onboarding process?
• Were there any delays or gaps in communication that prolonged the onboarding process?
• Were there any parts of the onboarding process that could have been completed more efficiently?

10. Customer Support

Customer support can play a critical role in ensuring a smooth onboarding experience, and any issues or problems with the support team can significantly impact the customer's overall satisfaction with the product or service. Here are some questions to include in your customer onboarding survey to understand how well the customers are assisted in the onboarding process.

• Did the support team provide sufficient guidance throughout the onboarding process?
• How easy was it to contact customer support during the onboarding process?
• Were your concerns or questions addressed in a timely manner by the support team?
• How knowledgeable and helpful was the support team in assisting you during the onboarding process
• Was the support team able to resolve any issues or problems you encountered during onboarding?

Why Use Customer Onboarding Survey?

The business value of obtaining customer feedback is enormous. Customer onboarding surveys are the most effective tools for businesses to collect feedback from customers and understand their needs. When your customers have a seamless onboarding experience, their first impression of you is likely to be positive, and they are more likely to remain loyal to your brand in the long run. Let us look at the reasons why you should use a customer onboarding survey.

Offer Personalized Experience

Customer Onboarding surveys help personalize your customers’ experience as you can segment them based on their business objectives, demographics, and needs. Collecting this data allows you to group your customers and offer a more personalized customer experience.

For example, you can provide targeted training resources, highlight relevant features, and personalize the messaging based on the customer's industry or job role. Personalization has been shown to improve customer satisfaction, with 80% of consumers saying they are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized experiences.

Increased Product Adoption

By leveraging customer onboarding surveys, you can identify any obstacles preventing your customers from adopting your product or service. Whether it's difficulty understanding how to use a particular feature or a general lack of comprehension, onboarding surveys provide valuable insight that enables you to offer targeted support.

This information allows you to customize guidance and training to align with your customer's needs and preferences, resulting in higher product adoption rates.

Remove Friction & Enhance Customer Experience

When you conduct customer onboarding surveys, you can identify friction points in the onboarding process and make necessary changes to enhance the customer experience. Maybe your customers are frustrated by too many pop-ups or a lack of video tutorial guidance, or they find the user interface confusing and difficult to navigate.

You can eliminate these roadblocks by reducing the number of pop-ups or making them less intrusive by creating more detailed video tutorials and conducting further user testing to identify UI improvement areas. This reduces the likelihood of customer churn and can lead to positive word-of-mouth referrals.

Streamline Onboarding Process

Customer onboarding surveys can help streamline the onboarding process at two levels. Firstly, by full-proofing seamless experience for future customers by acting on current customers' feedback. Secondly, by identifying the areas where customers may need additional support or guidance.

Optimizing the onboarding process is essential for any company as, in most cases, it is the first point of interaction with users after they sign up for your product. A positive customer onboarding experience can make a great first impression and establish trust with the customer.

Build Brand Loyalty

By giving customers’ opinions a space in the onboarding process, you can demonstrate that you are committed to providing a positive experience and are invested in meeting the needs and expectations of your customers.

Identifying the opportunity to personalize the onboarding experience enhances the customer’s connection to the brand. By tailoring the onboarding process to the customer's specific needs and preferences, you can demonstrate that you understand and care about your customers on an individual level.

Customer Onboarding Experience of Leading SaaS Companies

A major reason why the leading SaaS companies are at the top includes their customer onboarding experience. When customers are offered a smooth and hassle-free onboarding process, it can lead to higher customer satisfaction and retention rates, ultimately leading to the growth and success of the company. Let us look at how some of the top SaaS companies offer a seamless onboarding experience.

Slack 

Slack’s onboarding survey is engaging as it avoids giving boring linear product tours. With minimal contextual onboarding questions, Slack does not give survey fatigue to its new customers.

The customer onboarding survey questions in Slack include:

• Your team’s name
• The purpose for which you would want to use the application
• Inviting team members to join the application

By asking relevant questions during onboarding, Slack personalizes and segments the customer data to identify the problems they want to solve through its help.

Here is what makes Slack’s customer onboarding experience unique for its users:

• It follows a personalized approach: images change after each step to reflect user inputs
• It has an interactive product walkthrough hosted by Slackbot that educates users
• It introduces users to features like Threads and Activity through microcopy in empty states instead of long exhaustive tours

Trello

Trello's onboarding experience is designed around gamification, using a visual interface that feels like a game where users are encouraged to explore and experiment at their own pace.

The customer onboarding questions that Trello asks include

• Project’s name and creating a structure around it to get an idea of what and how the customers want the tasks to be performed
• Details in the Trello board like title, attaching files, checklists, and so on

By leveraging a persona-based approach, Trello requests its users to self-segment themselves by choosing their use case and customizing their onboarding experience accordingly.

Techniques that Trello uses to give an exclusive customer onboarding experience:

• A mini video in the beginning to give users a heads-up of what to expect
• It leverages content as the tutorial, familiarizing new customers with the interface through every word on the dashboard
• It motivates users to try the platform by encouraging them to create a task, complete it, and move it to ‘done’ showcasing its core functionality

HubSpot

HubSpot has dedicated onboarding specialists who are a point of contact throughout a new customer’s journey. The onboarding specialist arranges a discovery call to learn about the customer’s goals, challenges, and requirements.

Based on the information gathered during the discovery call, the onboarding specialist creates a customized onboarding plan tailored to the customer's specific needs and goals. When the customers explore the product while onboarding, HubSpot directly reaches out to them via an email survey.

Striking features of HubSpot’s customer onboarding survey:

• It just has a single question gauging customer satisfaction with an emoji-based survey
• The smiley face emojis immediately establish a connection suggesting the overall sentiment of the customers
• A written feedback option is also available to get qualitative feedback on customer’s onboarding experience

Asana

Asana's onboarding experience includes interactive tutorials that guide users through the various features and capabilities of the platform. Users are prompted to complete a series of tasks within Asana, such as creating a project or assigning a task, which helps them become familiar with the platform and its functionality.

Strategies that Asana uses to make its customer onboarding experience effective:

• It promotes collaboration and teamwork, encouraging users to invite team members to join their projects and assign tasks to them
• It recognizes the user's email host and adjusts the onboarding flow accordingly, such as using a specific call-to-action to open the user's Gmail inbox
• It sends weekly reports summarizing the user's task completion and project status, which encourages users to ramp up their productivity and engage with the platform continually

Best Practices for Implementing Customer Onboarding Survey 

Implementing a smooth customer onboarding survey can be a key value driver for your product, as 82% of enterprise organizations swear by it. Gathering accurate and actionable customer feedback requires more than just sending a feedback survey.

Let’s look at the best practices that you can include in your onboarding survey to gather maximum responses and work on them to offer a seamless customer onboarding experience:

Gather Qualitative and Quantitative Onboarding Data

While gathering quantitative data in a customer onboarding survey will give you a clear idea of the success of the onboarding process, identify trends, and determine metrics such as satisfaction rates and completion rates, drop-off points, etc., qualitative data will give rich insights on the customer experience further justifying the trends identified in the quantitative data.

Use a mix of open-ended and close-ended questions to gather both qualitative and quantitative feedback. Through your customer onboarding survey, your primary aim should be to understand and eliminate customers' issues, which can be maximized by collecting holistic data.

Choose the Right Time to Send the Survey

The best time to send a customer onboarding survey is shortly after the customer has completed their onboarding process so that the experience is fresh in the customer’s mind and they can provide accurate feedback. Try to send the onboarding survey within a week or two after the customer has started using the product or service to identify any issues or areas for improvement early on.

Sending multiple surveys can also effectively gather comprehensive feedback on the onboarding experience. This could include sending a survey after joining to gather feedback on the selection process, one after training to collect training feedback, and another after completing the onboarding process to gather feedback on the overall experience.

Test the Customer Onboarding Survey

To make the onboarding customer survey effective, test it with a small group of users or colleagues to identify confusing or unclear questions and make necessary changes before sending it out to a larger audience.

Testing the survey also helps ensure that the survey works as intended, without technical glitches or errors, and that the data collected is accurate and valuable for improving the onboarding experience.

Identify the Appropriate Survey Distribution Channels

To ensure that the survey reaches your intended audience and that the response rate is maximized, you can combine and use various channels mentioned below:

• Email: Sending a survey link via email is a common and effective way to reach customers who have recently completed the onboarding process
• In-app: Integrating the survey directly into the onboarding process or the app itself can increase response rates and provide immediate feedback
• SMS: Sending the survey via text message can be an effective way to reach customers who may not check their email regularly
• Website Pop-up: Displaying a pop-up survey on the website can capture customer feedback as they interact with the company's digital presence

Track & Take Action on Feedback

Make changes to the onboarding process based on the feedback to improve the overall customer experience and keep your customers informed about the improvements you made. Tracking and responding to feedback also provides valuable insights into customer needs and preferences, which can inform product development and business strategy beyond the onboarding process.

How Zonka Feedback Translates Your Customer Onboarding Journey into Informed Action?

An efficient customer onboarding feedback software can streamline the creation and distribution of onboarding surveys, saving time and effort. A good survey software not only helps to collect feedback but also works on it to improve the experience and enhance customer satisfaction. Here are some distinguishing features of Zonka Feedback that you can use to optimize your customer onboarding experience:

• Microsurveys: Create microsurveys like the NPS and easily measure customer satisfaction with your onboarding feedback
• User Segmentation: Segment users based on their attributes, survey response, visit analytics, survey score, and trigger surveys to the right set of customers at the right time
• Workflow Automation: Based on the customer onboarding response, send targeted messages automatically and collect qualitative feedback
• Response Tagging: Based on themes and keywords, identify common issues in the onboarding process and implement changes
• Distribution Channels: Share customer onboarding survey through various channels like website and in-app through feedback button or distribute using email and sms to send the survey to the appropriate customer based on their preferred medium

Conclusion

Conducting a customer onboarding survey is an essential step for you to enhance their customer experience, improve product adoption, and build brand loyalty. Using customer onboarding surveys, you can streamline their onboarding process and offer personalized experiences that remove friction.

Companies like Slack, Trello, HubSpot, and Asana have already set a high bar for delivering exceptional customer onboarding experiences. Focusing on their strategies and creating an onboarding survey that gauges all aspects of your customer experience, including their purchase intent, product experience, and onboarding communication, can elevate your customer onboarding experience.

By choosing the right Customer Experience Tool and opting for strategies like gathering quantitative and qualitative onboarding data, sending the customer onboarding survey at the right time, and knowing which distribution channels to share the survey, you can make your customer onboarding experience effective.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial with Zonka Feedback to understand your customers' pain points during onboarding and deliver a seamless onboarding experience. Don't let customer churn be your downfall – start creating an industry-leading onboarding experience today!