3 Ways to Make Sense of Qualtrics Surveys

As a product owner or marketer, you understand the importance of customer feedback. User surveys provide valuable insights into customer preferences, satisfaction, and pain points. 

One of the most valuable survey response types is free-form text, because it gives your users the opportunity to express their thoughts in any manner they choose. However, making sense of textual data can be a daunting task. In this blog post, we will discuss three ways to make sense of Qualtrics surveys (or any user surveys for that matter) to identify the key patterns and action items. 

Method 1: Manual annotations

Manually annotating survey responses and categorizing them into meaningful categories is a thorough and detailed approach to analyzing customer feedback. This method allows you to gain an in-depth understanding of the feedback and identify specific trends and themes. It is particularly useful when the data is limited, and you have the time and resources to go through each response manually. However, this method can be incredibly time-consuming and not feasible when you have a large volume of survey responses to analyze (say, over 200). When dealing with a significant amount of data, manually tagging each response can take days, if not weeks, and may not be the best use of your time. 

Method 2: Outsourcing annotations

This method involves hiring someone on Upwork or Fiverr to categorize your feedback for you and create a summary report. This approach saves you time while still providing a detailed summary of the feedback received. This method is ideal for businesses that lack the time or resources to manually tag each response. By outsourcing the task, you can focus on other essential business operations while still obtaining actionable insights from the survey responses. However, outsourcing comes with a cost, and the quality of the analysis may depend on the skills and experience of the individual or team you hire. Also, both method one and two rely on human annotations, meaning there is the potential for human error or bias when categorizing the responses, which can lead to inaccurate insights.

Method 3: Use a feedback analytics platform

A feedback analytics platform like Unwrap.ai can automatically categorize thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of survey responses in minutes, using a machine learning technology called natural language processing. It can perform basic tasks like sentiment analysis, and more complicated ones like automatic pattern detection to give you the most meaningful insights. Finally, you can teach the system what you care about most, so the output meshes best with your organization and product structure.

In conclusion, making sense of Qualtrics surveys is essential for businesses to gain actionable insights from customer feedback. Whether you choose to manually annotate the responses, hire someone to do it for you, or use a feedback analytics platform like Unwrap.ai, the key is to identify patterns and trends in the feedback that will help you improve your product or service. By doing so, you will be better equipped to meet the needs of your customers and stay ahead of the competition.