Ever wondered what happens to your answers to open ended questions in surveys?
I always thought that some schmuck in a basement office somewhere reads these and throws them in the trash can.
Or at best, they get ignored while your answers to multiple choice questions are cross checked with each other to check whether you have been paying attention. Answers to similar sounding questions are checked with each other for those that fill out surveys without paying much attention. More likely, they will be thrown out and the rest sliced, diced, demographed, analyzed and decisions taken!
But knowing HOW a particular checkout associate in a particular store was rude to you is useful information that businesses can use to take corrective measures.
Even more useful feedback may be hidden in some text somebody bothered to write down in a few sentences somewhere. That's possibly the most useful and most specific intelligence you can gather.
Almost 11 months ago I wrote a blog entry here - How and why your Consumer
Intelligence should be Real Time? .
The same company, Medallia that does surveys whose URLs are attached to your receipt at the bottom or at the top, has taken analysis of open ended responses to another level.
They are crunching through all open ended responses, parsing them using a Natural Language Parser from Stanford, classifying them into groups of responses and reporting on them.
Now that's converting a lot of useful feedback from customers into statistics you can use.
Especially if you have visited major department stores recently, every receipt for every purchase seems to be accompanied by an invite to a survey! I am guessing that this must be in the millions!
I don't think they have armies of people reading these responses and making some statistics out of them. This is practical only if someone automates the semi-understanding (full understanding is still 100 years away even if every sci-fi movie will tell you otherwise!) of these responses and classify the data into some kind of meaningful statistics that can be aggregated at the company level.
It is still useful for the store manager as it is to hear back from specific customers about specific problems they were having at the store.
Very useful stuff, especially in turning a lot of usually ignored open ended text responses into actionable Business Intelligence!
Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it. - Toni Morrison
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