A read-out of the docu tools 2021 customer survey — covering who uses the product, how they feel about it, which features carry their work, and where the next decade of construction documentation is headed.
A wide-format annual survey covering customers across construction, building services, and engineering. Most respondents have been with docu tools long enough to form a settled opinion — and most use the product weekly or more.
A construction-heavy base, weighted toward respondents who inherited the tool inside their company. Word-of-mouth and project participation drive the rest. Active formal channels — ads, fairs, social — barely move the needle.
Customers don't choose between PC and tablet — they use both. Eight in ten reach for the PC at the desk, and nearly three quarters reach for the iPad on site. Other devices play supporting roles.
Customers would recommend the product, and most would buy it again. But the channels through which they hear about updates lag behind — informedness scores negative, and intent to expand licenses is weakest of all.
Customers were asked to rate sixteen aspects of the software on a 1-to-5 scale. Time savings and Quality lead the field. Specialised application trails — perceived less as a unique strength than as a baseline expectation.
| Aspect | Distribution | Mean | n |
|---|
Of seventeen possible application areas, customers see docu tools as ideal for site-walk tasks — defect management, site inspections, condition surveys — and only adequate for back-office territory like document and plan management. The shape is consistent: site documentation strong, document management weak.
Customers ranked 35 features on a 1–5 scale of importance. Camera, reports, plan import, and pin categories anchor daily use; weather service, audio recordings, and the QR scanner sit at the bottom. The pattern points toward a clear hierarchy of the product's reasons-to-exist.
Respondents were given 25 points to distribute across the five core competencies of the product. Plan-based documentation takes the largest share, followed by reporting. Communication and collaboration come last — a hint that docu tools is read more as an evidence-capture tool than a team-coordination tool.
Customers see docu tools' fit across the building lifecycle. Execution is uncontested — nine in ten see it there. Operation and maintenance is the second territory, with planning and demolition trailing equally.
Respondents rated how well 26 attributes describe docu tools — covering product, team, philosophy, presence, communication. Each row's percentage is the share of respondents who marked the attribute as "rather" or "completely" applicable (top-2 box). The brand reads as professional, helpful, solution-oriented, and reliable — and notably not traditional.
Of fourteen forward-looking topics, the report-template editor, individual pin input fields, and automatic offline sync lead — practical extensions of the existing product. SAP integration and AI/robotics divide opinion most sharply: large groups at both ends of the scale.
A short read-out of what the data, considered as a whole, seems to be saying.
Recommend (NPS +30.65) and re-buy (NPS +31.54) are healthy. License-expansion intent (NPS −45.27) is the negative outlier — customers like the product but aren't planning to put more seats on it in the next 12 months.
The largest single discovery channel — by a wide margin — is "already in use at the company." Recommendation and project participation are next. Paid channels and social barely register.
Eight in ten use a PC, seven in ten use an iPad. Other devices are minor supporting roles. The product needs to feel right on both surfaces, not pick one.
It posts the highest application-fit mean of all 17 use-cases (4.70 of 5). Site inspections, condition surveys, and acceptance walkthroughs follow closely. Document and plan management trail furthest behind.
Customers feel under-informed about news. The newsletter is the only channel reaching half the base; nearly everyone misses the website's What's-new page, the YouTube channel, and the events calendar.
This isn't a survey of casual lookers. Findings here come from a base that has put the product into actual practice — usually inside a construction firm, usually for more than a year.