Coding Qualitative CSAT Responses

Many businesses have qualitative portions of their surveys that allow the customer to leave a comment or extend an answer. On a basic level, this can give the company insight into the minds of the customer and possibly uncover something that may help the company improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. There are stories of a single customer comment leading to a massive business change by sparking ideas that could help the company thrive.

But customer satisfaction should also always be focused on numbers, because numbers tell you the most about the changes you need to make. Numbers are how you can see what the customer population thinks, and can give you something to analyze beyond, hopefully, a subjective opinion.

If you have experts in coding on hand, you can code the data into a more specific and quantitative fashion. But you do not necessarily need to have this level of expertise to code the data. You can do something much more simple and still get interesting, relevant data.

Have one or two people code the qualitative answers into “positive” and negative.” You can also choose to break it out further, like “slightly negative/positive” or “neutral.” If you’re planning on taking this data very seriously it is always a good idea to also have two people go over the same data to make sure they both code it equally. You can also break the information out further by choosing types or categories for the information.

For example, if the information is about the customer help desk, and the coded data states that the responses are about equal positive and negative, that tells you something significant. You can then run analysis on these if you want, but the reality is that a quick glance can often tell you more than anything. The more negative the category, the worse.

The more positive, the better. What this also gives you is a tool that you can use to continue to track changes, which is easily one of the most important parts of customer satisfaction. You will, in the end, what the positivity numbers to rise and the negative numbers to go down, and breaking them out in this way can help you find out if that occurs.

Qualitative data can be incredibly valuable. Simply reading one answer can possibly give you more insight than an entire survey. But the best way to guarantee that this data is useful is to find a way to break it out into numbers, so you can get a visual idea of aspects of your customer service strategy and track changes over time.