10 Powerful Open-Ended Questions Examples for SaaS Growth in 2025

Are you asking your customers the right questions? Many SaaS companies rely on simple yes/no or multiple-choice surveys. These provide some data but often miss the real story behind customer actions. They don't tell you why a customer churns, upgrades, or recommends your product. That's where open-ended questions make a big difference.

They invite detailed, specific feedback that can show you exactly where to focus your product roadmap, improve your onboarding, or prevent a customer from leaving. To really understand customer behavior and drive growth, SaaS companies must also see the importance of asking better questions of your data, not just customers. Getting these kinds of rich, qualitative answers helps you make better decisions for your business.

This guide provides 10 powerful open-ended questions examples for SaaS teams. We will break down each question, looking at the strategic thinking behind its phrasing and the actionable information it can reveal. You'll learn how to use them to get feedback that truly matters for retention, product development, and marketing. We will also cover how you can deploy them using a tool like Surva.ai to start automated conversations that drive growth and build stronger customer relationships.

1. Why did you decide to cancel/downgrade your subscription?

This is the key churn deflection question. It is a direct query posed to customers at the exact moment they decide to leave. Its purpose is to capture the unfiltered, top-of-mind reason for their cancellation, providing your business with important, actionable feedback. Unlike multiple-choice surveys, this approach uncovers the "why" behind churn, whether it's related to price, missing features, poor usability, or a competitor's superior offer.

The value of this question lies in its timing. By asking it within the cancellation flow before the action is final, you create a final opportunity to intervene. The qualitative data collected is a goldmine for product, marketing, and customer success teams, helping to pinpoint patterns that quantitative data might miss. For example, a sudden spike in mentions of a specific competitor signals a direct market threat that needs immediate attention.

Strategic Breakdown

• Timing is Everything: Deploy this question directly in your cancellation or downgrade user interface. The feedback is most potent when the customer's motivation is fresh.
• Segment for Priority: Don't treat all responses equally. Analyze feedback from high-value customers (high MRR, long tenure) separately to prioritize fixes that protect your most important revenue streams.
• Automate Intervention: Use the response to trigger immediate, targeted retention offers. If a user mentions "price," you can automatically present a discount or a link to a more affordable plan.

Actionable Takeaways

• Integrate with Webhooks: Connect your survey tool (like Surva.ai) with payment processors like Stripe. This allows you to trigger automated workflows, such as notifying your success team via Slack the moment a high-value customer initiates a cancellation and provides a reason.
• Track Trends: Regularly review and tag responses. This helps you identify emerging issues, like a buggy feature or a new competitor gaining traction, before they become widespread problems.
• Close the Loop: When you fix an issue that a former customer mentioned, consider reaching out to them. This can sometimes win back their business and shows you value user feedback. You can explore a deeper list of subscription cancellation reasons on surva.ai to build out your own analysis tags.

2. What feature would have prevented you from canceling?

This is the product team's most important churn question. It drills past general dissatisfaction to pinpoint specific, tangible product gaps that are causing customers to leave. Unlike broader queries, this question forces a focus on the exact capability or functionality that, if present, would have retained the user's business. This makes it a very useful tool for prioritizing your product roadmap and making data-backed feature development decisions.

The power of this query is its direct link to revenue. By asking what's missing at the point of cancellation, you build a clear business case for future development. When numerous canceling users request the same feature, you have a strong signal that building it will directly affect retention. For example, Calendly discovered that robust team scheduling was a top request from enterprise customers, influencing their roadmap to better serve high-value accounts.

Strategic Breakdown

• Be Hyper-Specific: This question works best when you need to identify concrete product shortcomings. It steers the conversation away from price or support and directly toward feature-driven churn.
• Prioritize with Data: Use the volume of requests to rank feature importance. If 20% of churning users mention "portfolio management," as Asana might have found, that feature becomes a high-priority candidate for development.
• Segment for Insight: Analyze responses based on customer segments. A feature requested by your ideal, high-LTV customer profile should carry more weight than one requested by a low-value, poor-fit user.

Actionable Takeaways

• Create a Feedback-to-Roadmap Pipeline: Use a tool like Surva.ai to tag all responses with feature keywords (e.g., "API," "integration," "reporting"). Pipe this tagged data directly into product management software like Productboard to quantify demand and inform prioritization.
• Validate with Usage Data: Cross-reference feature requests with the canceling user's actual product usage. If a user requests advanced reporting but never used your basic reporting tools, their feedback may be less relevant.
• Proactively Communicate the Roadmap: When you decide to build a highly requested feature, notify the users who asked for it. This can win back churned customers and shows you are actively listening to feedback, improving your brand's reputation.

3. How could we have served you better as a customer?

This question shifts the focus from product-specific issues to the total customer experience. It’s a powerful, open-ended query designed to gather feedback on every non-product touchpoint, including onboarding, support interactions, and account management. It’s particularly valuable for identifying service gaps and improving the human elements of your SaaS business that directly affect loyalty and retention. By asking this, you uncover pain points in your customer journey that feature-request forms will never capture.

You get information on areas like response times, the quality of support documentation, or the effectiveness of your customer success managers. For instance, Zendesk famously discovered that a dedicated, high-touch onboarding process reduced churn by 25%. This question uncovers precisely those kinds of service-level opportunities. It helps teams see if customers feel supported and valued beyond just the software they use.

Strategic Breakdown

• Deploy at Key Milestones: Ask this after a support ticket is closed, following a quarterly business review (QBR), or within a churn survey. The context of a recent service interaction makes the feedback more specific and actionable.
• Target Specific Segments: Pose this question to customers who have had multiple interactions with your support team or those who have just completed their onboarding. Their recent experiences will provide rich, detailed feedback.
• Connect to Internal Teams: The feedback is a direct performance review for your customer-facing teams. Route responses directly to support and customer success leadership to use in training, coaching, and process improvement.

Actionable Takeaways

• Build Customer Success Playbooks: Analyze responses to identify common service-related challenges. Use these findings to create standardized playbooks for your Customer Success team on how to handle specific situations, like re-onboarding a struggling user or managing a feature complaint.
• Improve Support Documentation: If multiple customers mention confusion about a certain process, it's a clear signal that your knowledge base or help documentation is lacking. Use the direct feedback to update or create new support articles that address the issue proactively.
• Trigger Proactive Outreach: Set up automations to flag responses that mention poor onboarding or a lack of communication. Trigger a task for a customer success manager to reach out personally, offer a retraining session, and "close the loop" on the customer's feedback.

4. What would make you recommend us to a colleague or friend?

This forward-looking question identifies the specific conditions required for positive word-of-mouth promotion. It shifts the focus from fixing problems (churn) to creating advocates. By asking what it would take for a user to recommend your product, you uncover the key drivers of satisfaction and viral growth. This approach provides a clear roadmap for what to build or improve to turn passive users into active promoters.

The value of this open-ended question lies in its ability to pinpoint aspirational features and experiences. It reveals the gap between your current offering and one that users would be excited to share. For example, responses might highlight a desire for more seamless collaboration tools, better design, or specific integrations. This feedback is a direct line into your users' ideal version of your product, making it a valuable resource for product development and marketing.

Strategic Breakdown

• Targeted Deployment: This question is most effective when used as a follow-up to a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. It is particularly insightful when posed to "Passives" (users who score a 7 or 8), as it helps you see what it would take to convert them into enthusiastic "Promoters."
• Segment for Insight: Analyze responses based on user roles, company size, or plan type. A feature that makes your product recommendable to a startup founder might be different from what a user in an enterprise marketing team needs.
• Inform Your Roadmap: Treat the most common responses as direct requests for your product roadmap. These are not just suggestions; they are the features and improvements that are most likely to fuel organic growth and user advocacy.

Actionable Takeaways

• Automate NPS Follow-ups: Use a survey tool to automatically send this question to users who provide a "Passive" NPS score. This helps you consistently capture this valuable feedback without manual effort.
• Build Case Studies from Feedback: When you implement a feature that was frequently requested in these responses, reach out to the users who suggested it. Their story of asking for a feature and seeing it delivered can become a powerful case study or testimonial.
• Refine Marketing Messaging: The language users employ to describe their "ideal" features can be directly used in your marketing copy. If users repeatedly say they would recommend your product if it had "effortless team dashboards," that phrase is a proven way to describe the value of that feature.

5. What was your primary use case or goal when you signed up?

This is a foundational discovery question deployed at the very beginning of the customer journey. Its purpose is to capture the user's intent and motivation the moment they sign up, providing a clear picture of what they hope to achieve with your product. Asking this early helps you see the "job to be done" from the customer's perspective, which is often different from how you market your product.

The value of this question is its ability to inform segmentation and personalization from day one. When you know a user signed up to "manage team projects" versus "track personal tasks," you can adjust their onboarding experience to highlight the most relevant features. This immediate alignment between user goals and product experience dramatically increases the likelihood of activation and long-term retention. Companies like Notion use this information to see that while users sign up for simple note-taking, their "aha!" moment often comes from discovering database capabilities.

Strategic Breakdown

• Deploy Immediately: Ask this question in your welcome email or as the first step in your in-app onboarding flow. The user's goal is freshest right after sign-up, making their response highly accurate.
• Connect Intent to Behavior: Compare the stated use case with actual feature usage data. This helps you identify segments where user intent and behavior are misaligned, pointing to a potential onboarding gap or a misleading marketing message.
• Drive Personalization: Use the answer to dynamically adjust the user's first-run experience. For example, if a user's goal is "collaboration," guide them directly to features for inviting teammates and sharing documents.

Actionable Takeaways

• Embed in Onboarding Widgets: Use a tool like Surva.ai to embed this question directly into your app's welcome modal or onboarding checklist. This makes it a seamless part of the initial user experience rather than a separate, disjointed survey.
• Create Goal-Based Onboarding Tracks: Segment users based on their responses to trigger different onboarding email sequences or in-app tours. A user focused on "reporting" should receive different guidance than one focused on "data entry."
• Refine Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Analyze the goals of your most successful, high-LTV customers. If you find that "operations management" is the primary use case for your best customers, you can refocus your marketing efforts to attract more users with that specific goal.

6. What obstacles or challenges prevented you from achieving success with our product?

This is a powerful diagnostic question designed to uncover the specific friction points that stop users from reaching their goals. It moves beyond generic feedback to identify the precise barriers to adoption and success, whether they are product-related, educational, or logistical. The information reveals if users struggle with a complex setup, miss a key integration, or simply don't see how a feature fits into their workflow.

This approach is proactive, aiming to solve problems before they lead to churn. By asking users who show signs of low engagement, you can identify and address failure-to-launch issues head-on. For example, a project management tool might discover that non-technical teams find the initial setup too complicated, prompting the development of simpler templates. The data collected from these open-ended questions examples is a roadmap for improving onboarding, documentation, and customer support.

Strategic Breakdown

• Target Low-Engagement Users: Deploy this question to users who have completed onboarding but show low activity levels. This timing is perfect for catching potential issues before they become reasons for cancellation.
• Categorize Obstacles: Systematically tag responses into categories like "technical issue," "missing integration," "educational gap," or "workflow incompatibility." This helps quantify qualitative feedback and prioritize solutions.
• Inform Onboarding Paths: Use the most common obstacles identified to build guided onboarding flows that directly address these pain points, helping new users overcome them from day one.

Actionable Takeaways

• Automate Health Check-Ins: Use a tool like Surva.ai to trigger an automated in-app survey or email when a user's engagement score drops below a certain threshold. Ask this question to see their specific challenges.
• Build a Knowledge Base: Use the collected feedback to create targeted help articles, FAQs, and video tutorials that address the most frequently mentioned obstacles. This scales your support efforts effectively.
• Refine Your CSM Playbooks: Equip your customer success team with playbooks based on common barriers. When a CSM sees a user struggling with a known issue, they can proactively reach out with a proven solution. You can find out more by reviewing different methods for the analysis of survey data on surva.ai to structure your feedback.

7. How did you hear about us, and what made you decide to try our product?

This is a powerful, two-part question that connects marketing attribution with user motivation. It moves beyond simple "How did you hear about us?" dropdowns to uncover the channel and the specific catalyst that prompted a user to sign up. The first part identifies the source, while the second reveals the value proposition or pain point that resonated most strongly.

The value of this question is its ability to map marketing spend and effort to customer quality. By asking this early in the onboarding process, you capture fresh, accurate recall. This qualitative data helps you see which channels bring in users with the highest intent and alignment with your product's core features. For example, learning that users from a specific podcast are signing up to solve a unique problem allows you to create targeted messaging for that audience.

Strategic Breakdown

• Timing is Everything: Deploy this question in your initial onboarding survey or welcome flow. Asking within the first few minutes of signup helps the user's memory be clear and their motivation be top of mind.
• Segment for Quality: The goal is not just to find which channel drives the most signups, but which drives the best signups. Analyze responses by correlating them with user activation rates, retention, and eventual expansion revenue.
• Combine with Analytics: Use this qualitative feedback to add context to your quantitative data. Cross-reference free-form answers with UTM parameters in your analytics tools to build a complete picture of your acquisition funnels.

Actionable Takeaways

• Refine Marketing Spend: If you find that users from organic search mention a specific feature as their reason for signing up, you can double down on SEO content around that feature. If a paid channel brings in low-quality users, you can re-allocate that budget.
• Optimize Ad and Landing Page Copy: The language users repeat back to you is pure gold for your marketing team. Use their exact words describing their "aha moment" or the problem they needed to solve in your ad copy, headlines, and landing pages to improve conversion rates.
• Inform Partnership Strategy: When users consistently mention specific influencers, communities, or other software tools, it signals a strong potential for co-marketing or integration partnerships. These are warm leads for your business development team.

8. What's your biggest frustration with managing [specific business process] today?

This is a powerful problem-discovery question used in the earliest stages of product development and sales. It's designed to uncover deep, pre-existing pain points before your product is even mentioned. By focusing on the customer's current reality and their frustrations with a specific process, you gather unbiased, emotional feedback that highlights genuine market needs. This approach is fundamental to frameworks like Jobs to be Done, where seeing the customer's struggle is the key to creating a solution they will actually pay for.

The value of this question comes from its empathy-driven framing. Instead of asking "Would you use a tool that does X?", which primes the user to agree, you ask about their existing world. This uncovers the true "why" behind their operational challenges. For instance, Calendly discovered that the back-and-forth of scheduling was a massive administrative frustration, and Notion learned that scattered documentation created significant knowledge silos. These findings directly shaped their core value propositions.

Strategic Breakdown

• Context is Key: Use this question during initial sales discovery calls, user interviews, or early-stage market research. The goal is to learn, not to sell. Ask it before you introduce your solution to get the most honest response.
• Listen for Emotion: Pay close attention to words like "frustrating," "annoying," "time-consuming," or "nightmare." Emotional language signals a high-priority problem that people are highly motivated to solve.
• Focus on Process, Not Tools: Frame the question around a business activity (e.g., "managing sales leads," "reporting on marketing KPIs," "onboarding new hires") rather than a specific software they use. This keeps the conversation broad and uncovers systemic issues.

Actionable Takeaways

• Map Pain to Messaging: Use the exact language and frustrations you hear from prospects to write your marketing copy, landing pages, and sales scripts. This makes your messaging resonate deeply with your target audience's real-world problems.
• Create a "Frustration Log": Systematically record and tag the frustrations you hear in a central place like a spreadsheet or Notion database. This qualitative data becomes invaluable for prioritizing your product roadmap and identifying new feature opportunities.
• Refine Your Phrasing: The effectiveness of open-ended questions examples often depends on how they are worded. For more guidance, you can explore detailed resources on how to write effective survey questions to get the most accurate information.

9. What alternative solutions or competitors did you consider before choosing us?

This is a powerful competitive intelligence question. It is an open-ended query designed to reveal which competitors are on your customers' radar and, more importantly, the specific factors that influenced their final decision. The goal is to see your market positioning directly from the customer's perspective, providing invaluable information for product, marketing, and sales teams. Unlike internal assumptions, this approach gives you a direct look into the competitive landscape as your buyers see it.

The value of this question is its ability to uncover your true differentiators. When a new customer explains they chose you over a competitor like Microsoft Teams because of a superior user experience, as Slack discovered, that is a clear signal for your marketing message. Similarly, learning that your collaboration features won over a user from Adobe, a lesson Figma learned, helps your product team double down on what works. It maps your perceived strengths against actual purchasing drivers.

Strategic Breakdown

• Timing is Everything: Ask this question in an onboarding survey, ideally within the first 24-48 hours after a customer signs up. Their decision-making process is still fresh, leading to more accurate and detailed responses.
• Go a Level Deeper: Create a follow-up question. If a user mentions a specific competitor, you can ask, "What was the main reason you didn't choose [Competitor X]?" This pinpoints the exact weaknesses in your rival's offering.
• Combine with Sales Data: Cross-reference the answers with your sales pipeline data. See if the competitors mentioned by new customers match the ones your sales team frequently encounters in deals you win and lose.

Actionable Takeaways

• Update Sales Battle Cards: Use the direct customer quotes and reasons to arm your sales team with proven differentiators. If customers repeatedly say your reporting is simpler than Competitor Y's, that becomes a powerful, evidence-based talking point.
• Inform Your Product Roadmap: Share competitive information directly with the product team. If a pattern emerges where you are losing deals to a competitor because of a missing integration, that feedback can help prioritize future feature development.
• Refine Marketing Positioning: Analyze the language customers use to describe why they chose you. This authentic voice-of-customer data is gold for refining website copy, ad campaigns, and overall brand messaging to better resonate with your target audience.

10. What would you need to scale usage or increase your subscription level with us?

This question shifts the focus from retention to expansion. It's a forward-looking query designed to uncover the specific triggers that would compel your existing customers to upgrade their subscription or deepen their product usage. By asking this, you are requesting a roadmap for increasing customer lifetime value directly from the source. It moves the conversation from "what's wrong" to "what's next," identifying high-value features, integrations, or support levels that can unlock new revenue streams.

The power of this question is its collaborative nature. It positions your company as a partner invested in your customers' growth. Answers reveal the friction points preventing them from scaling, whether it's a missing enterprise-grade feature like advanced admin controls, higher usage limits for core functions, or a need for dedicated support. These findings are pure gold for product and customer success teams, guiding development priorities toward features that customers have already signaled a willingness to pay for.

Strategic Breakdown

• Target the Right Segment: Pose this question to your most engaged and successful customers. These "power users" have likely pushed the limits of their current plan and have the clearest vision for what they need to grow.
• Time it with Success: The best time to ask is after a customer has achieved a key milestone or expressed satisfaction. This could be during a quarterly business review (QBR) or via an in-app survey triggered by high usage metrics.
• Frame it as a Partnership: Position the question as a way to better support their future growth. This framing encourages more detailed and thoughtful responses, as customers see it as an opportunity to influence your roadmap for their benefit.

Actionable Takeaways

• Create Expansion-Focused Campaigns: Use the common themes from responses to build targeted marketing campaigns. If multiple customers mention needing more API calls, create a campaign highlighting your higher-tier plans that offer just that.
• Inform Your Product Roadmap: Feed this qualitative data directly to your product team. Tag and quantify requests in a CRM or a tool like Canny to prioritize features that have a clear path to generating expansion revenue.
• Equip Customer Success: Turn these findings into talking points for your customer success managers (CSMs). When a CSM knows a customer needs specific functionality to upgrade, they can proactively monitor the roadmap and engage when that feature is released.

Top 10 Open-Ended Customer Questions Comparison

Putting These Questions into Action

We've explored a complete list of open-ended questions examples, from uncovering the real reasons behind customer churn to identifying your most powerful marketing messages. Merely knowing these questions is only the starting point. The real value comes from integrating them into a system that transforms customer feedback from a collection of interesting anecdotes into a strategic asset. Moving from theory to practice means embedding these inquiries into the key moments of your customer lifecycle.

The power of these questions lies in their ability to provide context and uncover the "why" behind user behavior. A cancellation reason like "too expensive" is a dead end. In contrast, an answer to "What feature would have prevented you from canceling?" gives you a specific, actionable insight. It might reveal a gap in your feature set, a misunderstanding of your value proposition, or an opportunity to offer a more suitable plan.

From Information to Action

The goal is to move from passive data collection to active, insight-driven decision-making. Each category of questions we discussed serves a distinct strategic purpose:

• Onboarding & Activation: Questions like, "What was your primary use case or goal when you signed up?" help you personalize the user journey from day one, guiding new customers directly to the features that deliver immediate value.
• Retention & Churn: Asking, "What obstacles or challenges prevented you from achieving success with our product?" provides a direct roadmap for improving your product and support, turning potential churn risks into loyal advocates.
• Feature Feedback & Development: Inquiries such as, "What's your biggest frustration with managing [specific business process] today?" help prioritize your product roadmap based on genuine customer pain points, not just internal assumptions.
• Marketing & Testimonials: Using a question like, "What would make you recommend us to a colleague or friend?" uncovers your most compelling value propositions in your customers' own words, creating authentic marketing material.

This systematic approach to gathering feedback is foundational for any SaaS business, from early-stage development to scaling. In fact, these methods are invaluable for seeing user needs from the very beginning. For instance, you can learn more about how to validate a startup idea by asking targeted, open-ended questions to potential users to uncover their core problems and willingness to pay for a solution.

Building a Continuous Feedback Loop

The true transformation happens when you stop treating feedback as a one-time survey and start building a continuous conversation. This is where automation becomes your most valuable ally. Instead of manually sending emails and hoping for a response, you can trigger specific questions based on user behavior.

Imagine a user is on the cancellation page. An automated flow can instantly ask, "What feature would have prevented you from canceling?" If they mention a specific feature that already exists but they couldn't find, you can trigger an immediate, automated response showing them exactly where it is. This real-time interaction can save a customer on the spot. This is about using information to intervene and improve the customer experience in the moment.

By implementing these open-ended questions examples strategically, you create a direct line to your users. You learn what they value, where they struggle, and what they need to succeed. This knowledge is the fuel for sustainable growth, powering everything from product development to customer success and marketing. You are no longer guessing what your customers want; you are asking them directly and building a business that truly serves their needs.

Ready to turn these open-ended questions examples into automated, actionable insights? Surva.ai helps you build intelligent feedback flows that ask the right questions at the perfect time, so you can stop churn, improve activation, and build a better product. Start building your feedback engine today at Surva.ai.