Quick Summary
- Understand what open-ended questions are and why they uncover context, motivations, and friction points missed by closed questions.
- Explore 35 journey-specific open-ended survey question examples across CX, UX, product, checkout, onboarding, retention, marketing, brand, accessibility, and EX.
- Learn best practices on wording, timing, placement, and limiting prompts to protect completion rates.
- Follow a clear workflow for analyzing text using themes, sentiment, dashboards, and ownership routing.
- Turn qualitative feedback into actionable improvements that strengthen customer and employee experiences.
Open-ended survey questions invite respondents to answer in their own words, offering details and nuances that scaled questions alone cannot capture. Instead of forcing people into predefined options, these prompts expose motivations, expectations, and friction points that help teams understand the real drivers behind customer or employee behavior. When paired with Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES), they reveal the “why” behind the numbers, turning surface-level scores into an actionable context.
Because many businesses still struggle with vague prompts, low response rates, or overwhelming text analysis, this guide goes beyond simple examples. It provides 35 clear, journey-specific open-ended question examples, across CX, UX, product experience, checkout, onboarding, retention, marketing, brand, accessibility, and employee experience, along with practical advice on timing, placement, wording, and analysis. Whether you’re refining an existing survey or building a new one, these prompts and best practices will help you collect richer qualitative feedback while keeping the experience lightweight for respondents and analysts alike.
What are open-ended questions?
Open-ended questions are prompts that allow respondents to share thoughts in their own words, without being restricted to predefined choices or scales. Unlike closed, multiple-choice, or numerical items, which tell you what happened; open-ended responses explain why it happened. They reveal motivations, expectations, emotions, and context that structured questions often miss, making them invaluable for uncovering nuances and themes you didn’t know to ask about.
These questions fit naturally throughout the customer or employee journey. After a score-based question like NPS, CSAT, or CES, they help clarify drivers behind the rating. During onboarding, they expose early friction. In checkout, they highlight points of confusion that prevent conversion. Within product experience or support interactions, they surface missing features, unmet expectations, and service opportunities. And across employee experience, they give people space to express needs, frustrations, or ideas that rigid forms rarely capture.
Because respondents can express themselves freely, open-ended questions often reveal unexpected insights, patterns, sentiments, and root causes that shape smarter prioritization. When used sparingly and positioned thoughtfully, they avoid survey fatigue while amplifying the richness of your data. Ultimately, they transform feedback from quantitative snapshots into meaningful stories that guide improvements and help teams solve real problems with greater clarity.
Best practices that work
- Use neutral, non-leading wording to encourage honest, unbiased responses.
- Start prompts with “What”, “How”, or “Why” to signal that detail is welcome and to open the door for richer explanations.
- Keep questions concise and clear, so respondents aren’t overwhelmed or confused by what you’re asking.
- Make prompts specific, not vague, anchor them to a moment, task, or decision point such as a recent interaction, a feature used, or a checkout step.
- Use context-driven framing to help respondents recall details and give analysts cleaner, more actionable insights.
- Limit your survey to one or two open-ended questions to maintain strong completion rates and avoid qualitative fatigue.
- Place open-ended questions after key touchpoints; for example, directly after NPS, CSAT, CES, or a significant journey milestone.
- Add light context tags (e.g., product area, channel, customer type) to support scalable analysis without burdening respondents.
- Plan your analysis workflow in advance, so teams know how they will tag, theme, and act on responses.
- Ensure insights are routed to the right owners, so improvements happen quickly and consistently across teams.
35 open-ended examples
Open-ended questions become far more powerful when they’re tied to a specific moment in the customer, user, or employee journey. Instead of presenting a large, unstructured list, the following prompts are grouped into clear categories, NPS follow-ups, support interactions, UX friction, checkout, onboarding, product gaps, retention risks, marketing and brand perception, accessibility needs, employee experience, demographics, and a final catch-all section for context you may not have anticipated.
This structure makes it easier to select the right questions for your survey and prevents respondents from feeling overwhelmed. Many teams pair these one-line prompts with a targeted follow-up or a clarifying tag to give analysts more direction when coding themes or evaluating sentiment.
Whether you are improving customer experience, refining product design, boosting conversion, or strengthening internal culture, these 35 practical examples will help you capture specific, grounded feedback that drives actionable outcomes.
NPS follow-ups
| Question | Primary Goal | Key Insight & Value |
|---|---|---|
| “What’s the primary reason for your score?” | Uncover Drivers | Explains the why behind the rating. High scorers reveal strengths (speed/reliability), while detractors expose specific blockers or pain points. |
| “What would make you more likely to recommend us?” | Future Improvements | shifts focus forward. Reduces defensiveness and surfaces constructive suggestions regarding missing features or support speed. |
| “What did we do well?” | Identify Delight | Balances feedback by highlighting “delight moments.” Useful for refining customer success playbooks and identifying resonant behaviors. |
| “What could we improve?” | Capture Obstacles | Broadly identifies frustrations without forcing negativity. yields rich qualitative data on friction points with minimal burden on the respondent. |
| “What nearly stopped you from recommending us?” | Reveal “Near Misses” | Detects early warning signs and friction that didn’t fully derail the score but could turn promoters into detractors if ignored. |
1. “What’s the primary reason for your score?”
This is the classic NPS qualifier, and for good reason: it invites respondents to articulate the real drivers behind their likelihood to recommend. High scorers often reveal unexpected strengths, speed, reliability, ease of use, while detractors point to blockers, confusion, or pain points in vivid detail. The key is to keep this question tightly positioned after the NPS item to maintain cognitive continuity, helping people recall the exact experience that shaped their rating. Analysis typically benefits from tagging themes like product performance, service quality, or pricing, which helps quantify the biggest drivers of sentiment.
2. “What would make you more likely to recommend us?”
While the previous question uncovers root causes, this one point forward by asking about conditions for improvement. The phrasing keeps the tone constructive and reduces defensiveness. It tends to surface targeted suggestions around missing features, speed of support, better onboarding, or clearer communication. For strategic planning, this question complements the first one by highlighting clear opportunities for sentiment lift.
3. “What did we do well?”
Positive prompts help balance feedback and are especially valuable for understanding the moments that delight customers. This insight is often overlooked when surveys focus heavily on problems. Responses here can guide customer success playbooks, onboarding scripts, and product messaging by revealing the attributes or behaviors that resonate most, whether it’s personalization, speed, friendliness, or the clarity of instructions.
4. “What could we improve?”
This invites respondents to express frustration or identify obstacles without forcing them into a negative mindset. It’s broad enough to capture a range of improvements but still offers specific signals when analyzed alongside journey tags. Many companies use this question across multiple surveys because it consistently yields rich qualitative insight with minimal respondent burden.
5. “What nearly stopped you from recommending us?”
This question surfaces “near misses” issues that didn’t fully derail the recommendation but came close. These are often early warnings of friction that can turn promoters into detractors if left unaddressed. Examples include slow responses, confusing pricing structures, or initial challenges that were resolved but still noteworthy. Capturing this nuance can help prioritize mitigation efforts before they escalate into larger problems.
Support interactions
| Question | Primary Goal | Key Insight & Value |
|---|---|---|
| “What made your issue easy or hard to resolve today?” | Pinpoint Effort Drivers | Identifies specific variables affecting the journey, clarity, speed, tone, or competence, to directly inform coaching and workflow optimization. |
| “What did our team do that helped most?” | Reinforce Behaviors | Focuses on actions rather than just outcomes. Highlights empathy and proactive solving to help refine training and recognize top performers. |
| “What could we have done differently?” | Uncover Journey Gaps | Encourages reflection on missed opportunities. Often reveals issues unrelated to the specific fix, such as poor prior communication or lack of follow-up. |
6. “What made your issue easy or hard to resolve today?”
Support journeys vary widely in quality, and this prompt helps pinpoint the drivers of perceived ease or difficulty. The open structure encourages respondents to speak candidly about clarity, tone, speed, channel effectiveness, or agent competence. When categorized, these insights feed directly into coaching, workflow optimization, and channel strategy.
7. “What did our team do that helped most?”
This focuses attention on behaviors, not just outcomes. Customers may highlight empathy, proactive problem-solving, or friendliness, helping you refine best practices. It’s particularly useful when building training programs or recognizing top performers.
8. “What could we have done differently?”
This version encourages reflection on what was missing or could have been handled better. Sometimes respondents reveal gaps unrelated to the resolution itself; for example, unclear communication ahead of an issue, or a lack of follow-up, giving teams a fuller picture of the whole support journey.
UX and product usability
| Question | Primary Goal | Key Insight & Value |
|---|---|---|
| “What, if anything, made this page or task confusing?” | Identify Friction | Highlights specific usability hurdles—unclear labels, clutters, or missing instructions—to help prioritize high-impact UX fixes. |
| “What stopped you from completing your goal?” | Diagnose Blockers | Surfaces conversion killers like errors or trust concerns. Helps product managers pinpoint exactly where and why users drop off. |
| “What worked better than expected?” | Amplify Strengths | Reveals standout experiences (speed, simplicity) that delight users, identifying patterns to replicate across other touchpoints. |
9. “What, if anything, made this page or task confusing?”
Digital friction often shows up in small but critical details: unclear labels, visual clutter, missing instructions, or unpredictable interactions. This question helps teams prioritize UX changes by highlighting where users pause or struggle.
10. “What stopped you from completing your goal?”
A highly actionable question for funnel analysis. It surfaces the real blockers—trust concerns, error messages, missing information, or complexity. Prioritizing frequency of themes helps product managers assess which steps cost the most conversions.
11. “What worked better than expected?”
Positive UX insights reveal strengths you may want to amplify or replicate across other touchpoints. Predictability, speed, and simplicity often emerge here as unexpected wins.
Checkout and pricing
| Question | Primary Goal | Key Insight & Value |
|---|---|---|
| “What slowed you down during checkout?” | Target Conversion Barriers | Pinpoints hesitation points like payment friction or addressing entry problems, identifying areas for process speed optimization. |
| “What, if anything, felt unclear about pricing?” | Build Price Trust | Uncovers clarity issues around tiers, hidden fees, or value perception, providing direct feedback to marketing and product on communication gaps. |
| “How could we simplify payment or invoices?” | Reduce Billing Complexity | Helps businesses with complicated models reveal frustrations related to invoice formats, payment methods, or tax clarity for operational improvement. |
12. “What slowed you down during checkout?”
From payment friction to addressing entry problems, this prompt pinpoints conversion barriers. The clarity of the phrase “slowed you down” keeps the focus on moments of hesitation rather than generic dislike.
13. “What, if anything, felt unclear about pricing?”
Pricing confusion often erodes trust. This question uncovers misunderstandings around tiers, discounts, extra fees, or expected value, giving marketing and product teams direct insight into communication gaps.
14. “How could we simplify payment or invoices?”
Useful for businesses with complex billing models, this can reveal frustrations around invoice format, payment methods, timing, tax clarity, or reconciliation.
Onboarding
| Question | Primary Goal | Key Insight & Value |
|---|---|---|
| “Which step in onboarding felt most challenging, and why?” | Locate Specific Friction | Helps pinpoint the exact moment a user struggled, exposing documentation gaps, confusing terminology, or feature-set overwhelm. |
| “What would have helped you reach value sooner?” | Reduce Time-to-Value (TTV) | Highly actionable. Guides the prioritization of new resources like videos, simpler flows, or use-case examples for quicker success. |
| “What’s missing from our getting started guide?” | Improve Documentation | Solicits direct feedback on instructional content, revealing areas where guides need clarification, reordering, or expansion based on real user needs. |
15. “Which step in onboarding felt most challenging, and why?”
The specificity of the wording helps respondents locate the exact moment of friction. Responses often highlight documentation gaps, terminology confusion, or feature-set overwhelm.
16. “What would have helped you reach value sooner?”
A vital question for reducing time-to-value. Respondents might point to video walkthroughs, clearer setup flows, or better examples of use cases. The answers guide prioritization for onboarding design.
17. “What’s missing from our getting started guide?”
Documentation often lags real user needs. This prompt helps identify where instructions need clarification, reordering, or expansion.
Product feedback and feature gaps
| Question | Primary Goal | Key Insight & Value |
|---|---|---|
| “What’s one feature you wish we offered, and why?” | Roadmap Prioritization | Generates focused, targeted ideas. Pairing it with “why” separates essential needs from nice-to-haves, and directly supports roadmap planning. |
| “Where did our product fall short of your expectations?” | Align Expectations & Truth | Highlights expectation mismatches or unmet promises. Helps refine positioning, messaging, and onboarding to align with the product’s reality. |
| “What did you try to do but couldn’t?” | Uncover Task Failures | Exposes specific task-level failures and blocked workflows. This is highly actionable because it focuses on measurable gaps, not just sentiment. |
18. “What’s one feature you wish we offered, and why?”
This prompt generates targeted ideas rather than long wish lists. Pairing with “and why” helps distinguish essential needs from nice-to-have. Analysts should tag the product area to support roadmap planning.
19. “Where did our product fall short of your expectations?”
Expectation mismatches often reveal unmet promises or unclear messaging. These responses help align positioning, onboarding, and product truth.
20. “What did you try to do but couldn’t?”
This question uncovers task-level failures rather than emotional sentiment. It is one of the most actionable prompts for product teams because it highlights blocked workflows.
Retention and renewal
| Question | Primary Goal | Key Insight & Value |
|---|---|---|
| “What would cause you to reconsider renewing?” | Early Warning Signal | Identifies potential triggers for churn, such as product experience gaps, price sensitivity, or evolving customer needs, allowing for proactive intervention. |
| “What can we change today to keep you as a customer?” | Focus on Immediate Action | Surfaces immediate, actionable quick wins while also highlighting deeper structural issues that influence the retention decision. |
| “When did you last feel let down, and why?” | Pinpoint Emotional Lows | Captures specific journey-breaking moments and emotional lows. Valuable for validating the success of past improvement efforts. |
21. “What would cause you to reconsider renewing?”
Renewal risk is influenced by product experience, price sensitivity, evolving needs, or competitor pull. This question acts as an early warning signal.
22. “What can we change today to keep you as a customer?”
This prompt focuses on immediate, actionable opportunities. It often reveals quick wins while also highlighting deeper structural issues.
23. “When did you last feel let down, and why?”
Pinpointing emotional lows offer insight into journey-breaking moments. It also validates whether past improvements have taken effect.
Marketing and brand perception
| Question | Primary Goal | Key Insight & Value |
|---|---|---|
| “What information were you looking for but didn’t find?” | Uncover Content Gaps | Highly useful for SEO and AEO strategy. Pinpoints missing proof points, use cases, or differentiation details on high-value pages. |
| “How would you explain our product to a friend?” | Refine Value Proposition | Captures the authentic, simple language customers use, directly informing clearer marketing copy, web messaging, and positioning. |
| “How do we compare to the alternatives that you’ve considered?” | Assess Competitive Weakness | Reveals where customers see your product falling short, allowing you to prioritize improvements in areas where competitors consistently win. |
| “What made you choose us over a competitor?” | Amplify Differentiators | Highlights the specific, winning factors (e.g., trust, ease, reputation) that should be amplified across all sales and marketing materials. |
24. “What information were you looking for but didn’t find?”
This question is useful for content strategy and landing page evaluation. Gaps often relate to proof points, pricing, use cases, or differentiation.
25. “How would you explain our product to a friend?”
Respondents often simplify value propositions in clearer, more natural language than their own branding. These insights can inform messaging, web copy, and positioning.
26. “How do we compare to alternatives that you’ve considered?”
This prompt helps assess competitive strengths and weaknesses. Responses typically reveal what customers see as your unique advantage—or where competitors win.
27. “What made you choose us over a competitor?”
Answers tend to highlight differentiators that should be amplified in marketing and sales messaging. Trust, ease, reputation, or pricing commonly emerge.
Accessibility and inclusiveness
| Question | Primary Goal | Key Insight & Value |
|---|---|---|
| “What barriers did you face using our site or app?” | Uncover Access Blockers | Actively solicits unreported accessibility issues (contrast, screen readers, navigation) to guide mandatory compliance and design fixes. |
| “How can we make this experience more inclusive for you?” | Signal Openness & Care | Encourages users to suggest specific improvements (tone, language, interfaces), reinforcing the brand’s commitment to inclusivity. |
28. “What barriers did you face using our site or app?”
Accessibility blockers often go unreported unless actively solicited. This prompt invites users to highlight challenges with contrast, navigation, screen readers, forms, or responsiveness.
29. “How can we make this experience more inclusive for you?”
This phrasing signals openness and care without assuming a particular limitation. It invites suggestions around content tone, language options, and adaptable interfaces.
Employee experience (EX)
| Question | Primary Goal | Key Insight & Value |
|---|---|---|
| “What’s one process that slows you down, and why?” | Identify Operational Friction | Pinpoints internal bottlenecks (approvals, communication gaps, tool limitations) that interfere with productivity and lead to employee frustration. |
| “What change would make the biggest difference day to day?” | Target High-Impact Wins | Surfaces focused, practical improvements that directly boost morale, improve efficiency, and positively affect daily performance. |
| “How can your manager better support your growth?” | Assess Leadership & Coaching | Encourages candid reflection on management effectiveness, coaching quality, and specific needs for career development and support. |
30. “What’s one process that slows you down, and why?”
This identifies operational inefficiencies that interfere with productivity. Answers commonly involve approvals, communication gaps, or tool limitations.
31. “What change would make the biggest difference day to day?”
A focused, practical question that surfaces improvements with a high impact on morale or performance.
32. “How can your manager better support your growth?”
This prompt encourages reflection on leadership, coaching, and career development needs.
General context and final thoughts
| Question | Primary Goal | Key Insight & Value |
|---|---|---|
| “Would you like to add any identity context to help us serve you better?” | Personalize Service | Gathers sensitive, optional context (e.g., role, specific needs) with respect, aiding content personalization and building user Trust. |
| “Is there anything we didn’t ask that you’d like us to know?” | Capture Emergent Themes | Acts as an open safety net to capture unexpected, high-value insights or issues missed by structured questions. |
| “What else should we improve right now?” | Identify Immediate Fixes | A final, action-oriented prompt prompting reflection on short-term and long-term opportunities to quickly improve sentiment or reduce friction. |
33. “Would you like to add any identity context to help us serve you better?”
A sensitive, optional question that shows respect for personal boundaries. It helps teams personalize support or content while maintaining trust.
34. “Is there anything we didn’t ask that you’d like us to know?”
This keeps the survey open-ended, capturing emerging themes or unexpected insights that structured prompts can miss.
35. “What else should we improve right now?”
A final, action-oriented question prompting respondents to reflect on both short-term and long-term opportunities. It often uncovers immediate fixes that can quickly improve sentiment or reduce friction.
Analyze and act on text
Turning open-ended responses into meaningful action requires a structured, repeatable workflow. Use the checklist below to ensure your analysis is both scalable and reliable:
- Start with theming and tagging
- Group responses into categories such as product gaps, pricing clarity, support quality, or UX friction.
- Use consistent tags so insights can be compared over time.
- Prioritize themes based on frequency, severity, and customer impact.
- Add sentiment analysis
- Capture the emotional tone behind comments (positive, neutral, negative).
- Look for intensity markers—words that show urgency or frustration.
- Combine sentiment with journey stage to understand where emotions spike.
- Identify drivers and root causes
- Link themes to metrics like NPS, CSAT, or churn indicators.
- Look for repeated mentions of the same blockers or pain points.
- Use verbatim quotes to illustrate trends and support stakeholder discussions.
- Build dashboards and alerts
- Visualize themes, volume, sentiment, and trends over time.
- Set automated alerts for urgent categories such as billing issues or usability failures.
- Route insights to the owners best placed to act on them.
- Close the loop
- Share resolved issues or improvements with customers or employees.
- Validate whether changes address the underlying causes.
- Document learnings to strengthen future surveys.
Conclusion
Open-ended responses transform surveys from simple scorecards into rich narratives that reveal the motivations, expectations, and frustrations behind every rating. By allowing customers and employees to express themselves in their own words, you gain the context needed to prioritize improvements confidently and design experiences that feel genuinely responsive.
The key is to ask clear, purposeful prompts at the right moments after a critical task, a score-based question, or a significant interaction, so feedback is both focused and meaningful.
Planning your analysis workflow in advance ensures that every verbatim response is useful rather than overwhelming. When themes, sentiment, ownership, and routing are well defined, insights move quickly from raw text to action change.
Ultimately, open-ended questions help organizations listen more deeply, respond more intelligently, and close the loop in ways that build trust. Used sparingly but strategically, they turn feedback into a continuous engine of improvement that customers and employees feel every day.
Ready to move beyond scores and start building trust? Explore our advanced sentiment analysis platform today and turn every open-ended comment into a clear, actionable improvement plan.
FAQs
Q1: When should open-ended questions follow NPS, CSAT, or CES to capture useful context without hurting completion rates?
A: Place them immediately after the score while the experience is fresh. Limit to one follow-up to avoid fatigue and maintain high completion rates across short surveys.
Q2: How many open-ended prompts should a typical survey include balance depth with response rate and analysis effort?
A: Most surveys perform best with one to two open-ended questions. This captures meaningful detail without overwhelming respondents or creating excessive analysis workload for your team.
Q3: What’s the best way to analyze open-ended responses at scale and link themes to actions and owners?
A: Use consistent tagging, sentiment analysis, and dashboards. Assign owners to key themes and set routing rules, so issues reach accountable teams quickly and reliably.
Q4: How can neutral wording reduce bias and improve the quality of open-ended feedback across audiences?
A: Neutral, non-leading prompts encourage respondents to share honest experiences. Avoid assumptions or emotional framing, so feedback reflects their true perspective rather than guided interpretations.
