Quantify open-ended survey questions

Open questions offer significant insights from respondents as they are not limited to preset answer choices and can provide feedback that you did not expect.

Reading so many open responses can be time consuming, so the first step is to tag and categorize the answers using text analysis. The next step is to add sentiment to the responses. For instance, if you have a hotel, and respondents are talking about the 'cleanliness', you want to know if they are being positive of negative about it.

Simplify

After you set up auto-tagging to code and count the sentiment for the different categories, the next step is to determine how you can best report and track them over time.

Similar to NPS, we will boil down all the sentiment data to a single number NSS. NSS is the percent of positive sentiments minus the percent of negative sentiments.

% positive - % negative = NSS

Track over time

With the NSS score, a single number, you can now plot it on a timeline and spot trends. This consolidates a large amount of information into one chart.

Example

Using an earlier example, this hotel quickly noticed an issue with their cleaning staff in August. Management took action and discovered that the hotel was full and with a couple of people out sick, their cleaning team was overworked. Some extra staff was brought in and the issue was resolved.

Adding a Net Sentiment Score to a report

Follow these steps to add an NSS timeline to your survey report:

1. Open your survey.

2. Select Analyze > Reports.

3. Edit an existing report or create a new one.

4. In the report, select the element after which you would like the new element to appear. Otherwise, it will be added to the end of the report.

5. Click Add element.

6. Select the Element type tab.

7. Select Timeline.

8. Select your open-ended question that has been tagged with sentiment.

Under the Data tab in the Properties pane, you can determine which tags you want to appear on the timeline.