Feedback topics
Alex Bitca avatar
Written by Alex Bitca
Updated over a week ago

Feedback topics help you understand what your survey responses are about and into what theme bucket they fall in. Moreover, each topic assigned to a survey response will also have a sentiment assigned to it to show whether the respondent is satisfied with this particular theme.

For example, if the respondent said something along the lines of "Your product is great and costs next to nothing. However, it took a while for your team to reach back with an answer to a simple question." then next to it, you might see the following topics and sentiment:

  • Product (positive)

  • Price (positive)

  • Customer support (negative)

How to create topics

When you create a new Retently account, industry-relevant topics are automatically added to your account. You can also add or delete topics manually on the Feedback Attributes page.

Also, if your subscription plan includes the automated feedback classification feature, then there is nothing you need to do, as our algorithm will identify and apply topics automatically to received responses.

If you create topics manually, please follow our naming guidelines to ensure accurate analysis by our algorithm. Topics should be neutral nouns (e.g., Pricing, Customer service, Product quality, etc.). Avoid using adjectives (such as "Good quality", "Bad product", etc., in your topic names, as our algorithm will associate a sentiment (positive, neutral, negative) to each topic in a survey response, and adjectives are redundant and will result in inaccurate results.

How to apply topics to survey responses

Each survey response widget has a dedicated section where you can manually choose an existing topic or create a new one and assign it with a corresponding sentiment.

However, this manual process will become a challenge if you have a larger volume of survey responses to process.

Therefore, you can activate the automated feedback classification option within your survey campaigns and let our algorithm do the work.

Whenever you receive a new survey response, the algorithm will analyze it and apply one or more relevant topics from your account. The algorithm will add new topics based on the respondent's answer when needed.

How to analyze topics data

The applied topics will be shown in reports on the "Topics" page, where you can see your top 5 positive and negative topics, along with a list of all your topics and how many satisfied, neutral, or unsatisfied responses they have participated in.

You can also access a Sentiment Analysis report on the "Analytics" page, showing how many positive, neutral, or negative sentiments have been applied to topics monthly for the past year.

Did this answer your question?