Unlocking Insights: 5 In-App Survey Use Cases to Better Understand Your Users

Every click, swipe, and interaction tells a story - a narrative of your users' journey.

But this narrative can sometimes be overcrowded with misleading information, or vice-versa, it can be missing some crucial insights that you need to iterate.

That's where you need to tap into the real voice of your users by straight-up getting information from them, using in-app surveys.

In this blog, I'll go over the top 5 use cases of in-app surveys, to help you hit a home run with every question you ask and get the most value out of your surveys:

Why Do In-App Surveys Matter?

Generally, getting user feedback through in-app surveys, off-app surveys, interviews, or support chats is a lifeline for product teams looking to improve their product strategy, prioritize development, or make much-appreciated and resonating changes that strengthen their relationship with users.

In-app surveys specifically, take the feedback-gathering process to the next level, unlocking raw and fast insights:

An in-app survey, when developed correctly, has three amazing benefits for any software business:

Provides users the ability to easily give feedback 🔨

Feedback collection methods other than in-app surveys require users to invest too much effort for it to be a seamless experience.

They need to get out of your app, enter their details, or just go through multiple steps to get to a point where they can just provide raw feedback.

In-app surveys eliminate this effort, by being triggered at the right time for users, it brings the users directly to the feedback input stage. When these extra and unnecessary frictions are skipped, the users will be more likely to submit their feedback, significantly improving engagement and completion rates for your surveys.

Allows you to capture real-time feedback 💬

Another prominent benefit of in-app surveys is that they allow you to get feedback in the exact user journey stage that you need it in.

Unlike other feedback methods which are usually delayed, and may suffer from recall bias, in-app surveys capture the user's thoughts and feelings immediately.

This real-time feedback is invaluable. It provides a snapshot of the user's emotions and perceptions right when they're experiencing a feature or a process, making the insights more accurate and actionable.

It's like having a live commentary on your user's experience, helping you understand pain points, delights, and areas of improvement in the here and now.

Enables personalizations 👥

With in-app surveys, you're not just collecting general feedback; you're collecting data that can be deeply integrated into enhancing user experiences.

By understanding individual user preferences, pain points, and desires, businesses can tailor the app experience to better fit each user's needs.

This means presenting them with content, features, or prompts that resonate with their usage patterns and preferences. Over time, this not only boosts user satisfaction but also makes them feel seen and valued.

A personalized experience, derived from their own feedback and preferences, will end up skyrocketing user engagement and help you create meaningful relationships with your users.

Now let's take a look at 5 use cases that will help you achieve significant progress with your in-app surveys:

5 In-App Survey Use Cases To Maximize Feedback Efficiency

1- Measuring Product / Feature Satisfaction

Collecting direct feedback from users is essential for product managers and developers to understand what features or improvements are most important to users. 

If you don’t have in-app surveys, or if you prefer to ask your questions through email, the time lost between the experience and the time they answer the survey creates friction in the experience.

And that causes the answers to be of lower quality.

You can run timely in-app surveys to measure satisfaction with individual features, experiences (such as the overall onboarding experience), or the whole product.

Try asking one or more of these questions on your survey to learn more about how satisfied your users are:

• How would you rate our onboarding experience? (along with a numbered scale)
• What features do you find most valuable in our product? 
• How satisfied are you with our product/service?
• How satisfied are you with the frequency and quality of product updates and new features?

2- Product Roadmap Prioritization

By gathering feedback from engaged users, you can validate and prioritize product ideas and concepts before you invest huge development resources into building them.

This will help you take the direction that aligns with your users' expectations, and save you from wasting precious effort by preventing you from building features that will not address the needs of your target audience.

Consider these questions to direct your product roadmap prioritization:

• What other features would you like our solution to offer?
• Are there any specific tasks that you find difficult to perform with our current solutions?
• How does our product fit into your overall workflow, and how could it be better?
• Which of these third-party integrations do you wish to integrate with our product?

3- Support Ticket Collection

By using an always-available in-app survey that can be triggered anytime, you can collect help questions or other support requests instantly, right from your app.

Most end-users prefer to look for an alternative rather than getting help from the support team when they encounter a problem. This becomes a bigger issue if reaching the support team is difficult, and requires the user to go through multiple pages.

In-app surveys will allow users to seek help easily and enable you to promptly address issues while enhancing your overall support service without any added cost.

Here are some questions for support ticket collection:

• What type of an issue are you facing?
• Please describe the potential bug you’ve encountered.
• On which topic do you require help?
• What is your main reason for requesting a support call?

4- Churn Reduction / Deflection

​​In-app surveys are crucial for reducing or deflecting churn because they give you direct access to users who are considering leaving your product.

Having an internal surveying mechanism, you can see which user groups usually give lower points on your surveys. With UserGuiding, you can also dig deeper into their activities, and find common patterns that lead to churn.

By understanding the common reasons behind user churn through these surveys, you can implement measures to retain these users.

Here are some churn survey questions that will help you take proactive steps to retain customers:

• What are the reasons for canceling your subscription?
• Is there a specific feature or improvement that would convince you to stay with us?
• What are the next steps you consider taking should you leave our product?
• Would you be interested in personalized assistance to make the most of our product/service?

5- Measuring NPS

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) can help you assess the level of user loyalty and identify promoters, passives, and detractors.

You can then offer them specific experiences, incentives, or promotions for these different user groups.

While implementing an in-app NPS survey to measure the likelihood of users recommending your product to others, consider these questions:

• How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or a colleague?
• On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend our latest feature to others?
• What is the primary reason for your score?
• Please elaborate on why you chose this score.

Next Steps

Understanding your users is the key to building products that resonate, evolve, and thrive in the right direction. In-app surveys give you the power to do just that, in the most seamless way possible, both for you and your users.

UserGuiding's in-app surveys feature is your closest comrade in creating, fine-tuning, and analyzing your in-app surveys; which then can be used to segment users and personalize their experience, whether it is through your other UserGuiding content or by integrating your survey results into other product analytics and engagement platforms.

Take it for a spin and start generating user feedback in an automated fashion.