Track sentiment from answers given to open-ended questions on a timeline to spot trends faster! Use Net Sentiment Score (NSS) which is simply the percent of positive sentiments minus the percent of negative sentiments.

Open questions offer a treasure trove of insights from respondents as they are not limited to preset answer choices and therefore 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. Great, now we know how many people are happy or unhappy about a category…

Now that we have setup auto-tagging to code and count the sentiment for the different categories, how can we best report and track them over time?

Taking a page from the popular Net Promoter Score, which is well known and simple to understand, we will boil down all the sentiment data to a single number Net Sentiment Score (NSS). NSS is simply the percent of positive sentiments minus the percent of negative sentiments.

% positive – % negative = Net Sentiment Score

Now that we have our NSS, a single number, we can plot it on a timeline and easily spot trends. This consolidates a huge amount of information into an easy to read chart!

Looking at the example in the chart at the top, 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. Customers happy, staff happy, bottom-line happy. ?

Follow these steps to add a Net Sentiment Score (NSS) timeline to your survey report:

1. Go to the survey.
2. Click on Analyze.
3. Click on Reports.
4. Edit an existing report or create a new report.
5. 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.
6. Click on Add element.
7. Select the Element type tab.
8. Select Timeline.
9. Select your open-ended question which has been tagged with sentiment.

The element will appear. Under the Data tab in the Properties pane you can determine which tags you would like to appear on the timeline.