How to improve your customer onboarding with a feedback survey

The generic rule is the less steps in your customer onboarding the better, but often there are still a lot of things happening behind the scenes: account creation, company profile creation, events are fired, payment details are submitted, etc. We enjoy the topic of onboarding, and especially how you can make it better.

Getting feedback on the customer onboarding is mostly a qualitative feedback strategy. You probably don't (although we hope you do!) have hundreds of customers onboarding every day. But that doesn't really matter, because imagine that just one customer tells you:

I found it really confusing that I had to do X

Then you look into X and improve it. It will make it better for all those customers that sign up after this one.

Feedback on auto-pilot

When you install our widget you don't have think about how or when to collect feedback, it's just there for every user. Let's look at some widget types that you can use to collect onboarding feedback.

Option 1: Bottom sticky widget

This is the widget that pops open at the bottom and stays there until the customer submits a response or closes it. You can trigger it to open directly on page load, for example when a customer lands in your dashboard after onboarding. Or you can trigger it programmatically with a few lines of Javascript, for instance after pressing a button. You can use a the 5-star scale or the 5-emoji scale and use that to get a CES or CSAT score specifically for onboarding. Monitor this score every few days and you'll always have an idea of how your onboarding is going and how to improve it.

The bottom sticky widget in onboarding

Option 2: Inline

The inline widget is displayed within your content. It's most used for getting feedback on blog posts, FAQs and documentation but you can easily integrate it in the customer journey. Put it in one specific step so when customers get stuck or want to give other feedback they have a direct way of doing this. An example is a user settings page: the inline widget can be next to the fields that a customer can update, or at the bottom of a page. Asking customers 'Did you find what you were looking for' with a simple thumbs up/down will go a long way!

How AppSignal uses the inline widget

Option 3: Side sticky widget

If you want you can always have a 'Feedback' label that's always displayed on the side of your page. This gives your users a place where they can always go to give you feedback when they're happy or stuck, no matter what page they're on.Note that here the number of responses you'll get will be lower vs when you trigger a bottom sticky widget because it's a more passive way of collecting feedback. But it's very useful nonetheless, because even just a few notes of customers getting stuck will instantly indicate where you need improvements.

How PingPing uses the side sticky widget to collect feedback

Cooldown logic

Note that in your survey settings you can set that the widget is not shown to customer after they've filled out a response or after they've closed the widget without filling out a response. Make sure that you enable this, because showing surveys shouldn't become something annoying. We've actually built a custom implementation of this to make sure it's both realiable and privacy friendly (we don't use cookies).

More examples

Have a look at our examples page for more details on how and when to use Freddy's widgets to get insights into your customer onboarding.