Category: Text Analysis

How Can Sentiment Analysis Be Used to Improve Customer Experience?

Sentiment analysis reveals the emotions your customers feel—but knowing how they feel is only useful if you know why they feel the emotion in the first place. If you want to improve customer experience, you need more than just emotional data. You need to know what customers are actually saying so you can identify key […]

March 13, 2025

Analyzing Open Ended Survey Questions—Is AI Your Solution?

Analyzing open ended survey questions is the single most fruitful method for getting meaningful, honest feedback. Employees and customers can express themselves through text and say what’s really on their minds in a way that’s impossible through structured rating questions. Open-ends are your ‘gold’ but extracting the gold is challenging, which is why companies look […]

December 10, 2024

When & Where AI for Customer Experience Fits

Updated 10/17/2024: Artificial Intelligence has infiltrated every market, and the customer experience is no exception. While AI for customer experience is nascent, it already shows tremendous value as way to measure experiences, and as a lever to improve them. AI is a powerful tool. But all too often, “AI” is slapped onto products without it being […]

July 10, 2023

Not Another Word Cloud—Please!

Now that you’ve asked the Net Promoter question, what should you do with the follow-up question? Are you considering simply reading the comments, or using a word cloud to pull out major themes? Geoff Colvin writes in ‘The Simple Metric That’s Taking Over Big Business’ (May 2020, Fortune magazine) the star of Net Promoter is […]

June 19, 2020

Survey Text Analysis: What Open-Ends Reveal (That Scores Never Will)

Last Updated: June 5, 2025 Companies obsess over survey scores. But the real gold—the part where customers actually say what they think—is buried in the open-ended responses. These unstructured comments are where customers vent, explain, and suggest. It’s where emotion and insight live. And yes, of course, most companies look at them, usually plugging them […]

June 16, 2016

How to Analyze Open-Ended Survey Responses to Drive Better CX Decisions

Last Updated: February 17, 2026 Open-ended survey analysis is the systematic process of transforming unstructured text feedback into quantifiable, actionable data. While closed-ended scores (like NPS) track “what” is happening, open-ended analysis explains “why” by identifying specific customer pain points, emotions, and unmet needs. According to Forrester, even a one-point improvement in a large organization’s […]

April 12, 2016

Missed Opportunities in Unstructured Data

Most companies have many missed opportunities in their unstructured data. But what is it? “Unstructured data,” i.e., data that cannot be captured via yes/no categories or multiple-choice formats, is all the rage with customer experience improvement experts. Customer comments, chats with customer service, phone conversations—these are all great examples of unstructured data. What makes unstructured […]

January 24, 2014

Unstructured Data: Start With an Open Mind

Unstructured data is invaluable to your customer feedback, but only if you know how to approach it. We heard a great webinar from Bruce Tempkin at CXPA yesterday about how to gain customer insights from unstructured data. Bruce addressed the cavernous disconnect between limited, multiple-choice responses and the reality of complex customer thoughts and feelings. What We’d Add […]

August 12, 2011