Survey Coding Best Practices

Your customers can offer you insights that can help your business in so many ways. This is one of the major reasons why customer feedback is very important in businesses.

Without it, you may find your business struggling to meet up with the needs of your customers. You can read this post to learn why customer feedback is so important. Thankfully, there are several ways to collect this important information; one of which is surveys.

Adding open-end questions to your survey can help you gather the information that you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten. This can make your survey gather more qualitative and quantitative data. Once the data have been gathered, a process known as survey coding will be carried out.

This process involves taking the responses to these open-end questions and then grouping them into categories. This grouping will make it possible for you or your team to analyze the responses just like the way you’d have analyzed multiple-option questions.

This process can be quite tedious; however, it must be done carefully. In this article, we will share some tips and some of the best practices you can use when carrying out this process.

Coding Approaches

Manual Coding

This approach was invented several years ago. With this approach, every free-text reply is coded with either 1 or more categories. If the responses aren’t so much, let’s say about a few hundred, you can choose to carry it out yourself. You can also decide to get an agent for the job.

Automated Coding

This approach became a lot more popular recently. Here, algorithms are the tools used to carry out this task. Sometimes, generic NLP libraries are used by data scientists in this approach. However, tuning these libraries can be somewhat difficult; interpreting the results may also be difficult.

This is why most people opt for solutions that use algorithms specifically made for coding customers’ responses.

Best Open-End Survey Coding Practices

It doesn’t matter the approach you choose (whether automated or manual), the practices below will help you get the best results regardless.

1. Do Not Be Biased

Do not start the process with an idea of what you’d find in the responses. Doing this might make your categories pre-defined. So, instead of doing the coding with a preconceived notion, remove all bias from your mind. This will make sure the categories come from the data.

2. Be Consistent

If you come up with new categories over time, then you’d have to reanalyze the responses you’ve previously coded. Ensure you continue to iterate until every response is categorized based on the present themes and categories in your dataset.

3. Provide Coverage

Ensure that the codes cover several different categories. For instance, a tech company would typically have categories relating to the product’s UI, customer service, stability, brand, and other specific features.

Note that these practices also apply to several other types of surveys including net promoter score. You can visit https://en.wikipedia.org/ to learn more about the net promoter score.

Survey Coding Tips

The following are some tips to follow during the process:

1. Create several categories and then narrow them down: Once you initially lay out the categories, consider them and then combine those that can be combined. You may start with several codes but may find yourself left with about eight or twelve codes.

2. You can use 2 or more codes for one response: Several times, the respondent may provide several comments on one question and these comments could span a lot of topics. If you limit this response to just one code, you’d end up understating the other concerns of the respondent.

3. Make sure your codes are unambiguous, accurate and cover the comments under them: Let’s say someone looks at your code title, will they know the kind of comments that will be under it? Your codes should be plain enough for someone to easily know their categories. Do not use unambiguous codes that will make things unclear.

For instance, do not make a “service-related” category. This can mean several things; do you mean billing service or customer service? No one will know unless you are there to spell out what you meant by the code.

4. Ensure every respondent’s comment counts: Ensure that during the survey coding you create encompassing categories that will cover every response. Even if you have some outliners that you categorize into an “Other” category, you need to make sure that they are mentioned or/and footnoted.

Conclusion

Open-end questions in surveys can help you see the real needs of your customers. This is because they aren’t aided all through the survey, so they get to say/write anything they feel like saying or writing. This kind of question allows you to see exactly how your respondents feel.  However, without survey coding, you may be unable to properly analyze the data collected. This is why, in this article, we have shared some practices that will help you do a good job when carrying out this process.