In-App Surveys

What are in-app surveys?

In-app surveys are a method to collect feedback, measure customer satisfaction and identify enhancements from users at a granular level within the application.

With 48% of daily internet access happening via mobile devices and the average user spending 3.7 hours a day on their smartphone, if your B2B SaaS company is not collecting valuable in-app feedback from customers on one of their most productive devices, you are clearly missing out.

As with any survey, in-app surveys prompt customers for qualitative and quantitative feedback on their experience with your application and highlight areas where you can improve performance or increase focus to drive deeper brand loyalty. The survey can focus on specific features or functions or collect feedback on the overall impression of your app and how it delivers your service through a mobile device. Surveys can be as simple as one question or lead to a more in-depth survey for more detailed responses.

Why is using in-app surveys important?

One of the most important aspects of collecting feedback from your customers is meeting them where they are. While email and online, computer-based surveys are sure to capture a large number of responses, given the rise in importance of mobile apps, you cannot forget about this source of data too.

In addition to this, there are other reasons why utilizing in-app surveys to collect data is important. These include:

• Broaden Understanding of User Experience: Whether it’s an app-specific survey, thoughts about a new feature or tool, or a simple Net Promoter Score (NPS) question, because different users use your app at different times, using in-app surveys can help form a more holistic understanding of how your platform is performing.
• Capture Real-Time Feedback: With cutting-edge customer success software, you can prompt customers for feedback right after they perform a key action or use a new tool. This helps to collect feedback when it matters and when it is fresh in their minds.
• Demonstrate Your Focus on Feedback: If you take the time to prompt and collect feedback across all of the mediums available to your customers, your users will see that you are taking their opinions seriously, helping to build deeper loyalty.
• Lower Barriers to Participation: In-app surveys reduce the number of steps users need to take to complete a survey by keeping them within the same interface (instead of launching a web browser). This helps to increase response rate while also giving you the opportunity to perform more specific audience targeting.

With 86% of customers saying that they are willing to pay more for a great customer experience and 65% saying it is the most influential factor driving their use, there is a strong ROI to focusing on feedback.

How can you improve your use of in-app surveys?

There are plenty of in-app survey examples out there to build your own questions off of, but it is equally important to focus on the delivery of your survey. Here are some best practices:

• Don’t prompt users too soon or too much: Prompting users too soon in their use of your app can not only disrupt their adoption, but it also gives you incomplete feedback. Similarly, prompting too frequently — more than twice — or preventing the ability to dismiss the form can make your brand seem too pushy.
• Wait until they complete a task: Trigger a survey to launch after a task is performed, not in the middle of a workflow. This can frustrate customers and increase the chance they will dismiss the prompt.
• Know your audience: If you are curious about how your app handles report generation, notifications or performs certain tasks, ask only those users who have completed those tasks to reply, which helps to make your data more meaningful and accurate.
• Keep it simple: When it comes to surveys, especially within an app, the shorter the better. Also utilize your customer usage data to target the right types of users to get the data you need over time instead of a large, undefined launch.