---
title: Understanding the words customer share
description: Quantitative feedback is limited to responses to the questions asked. Free form questions encourage customers to share thoughts in their own words.
image: https://www.smokeci.com/hubfs/Making%20sense%20of%20the%20words%20people%20use.jpg
---

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# Understanding the words customer share

[![Picture of Smoke Customer Intelligence](https://www.smokeci.com/hubfs/2023%20Smoke%20CI%20Website%20Assets/C2A%20Images/Icon-Jpeg.jpg) Smoke Customer Intelligence ](https://www.smokeci.com/content/author/smoke-customer-intelligence) :  Updated on February 20, 2024

[VOC for Contact Centers](https://www.smokeci.com/content/tag/voc-for-contact-centers)

![Understanding the words customer share](https://www.smokeci.com/hubfs/Making%20sense%20of%20the%20words%20people%20use.jpg)

Customer feedback has become hugely popular over the last two decades. Thanks to its ease of implementation, quantitative research is a popular feedback mechanism. However, relying solely on this form of feedback means that customers are limited to responding to the questions asked. This creates a bias in that organisations are limited to the information in questions asked, with no insight into whether customers with to share insights into any areas not directly asked. It is important to include free form questions in data collection to encourage customers to share their thoughts in their own words. The challenge in the ability to translate these verbatim comments into usable insight

We do this using Eyerys text and sentiment analytics.

**[Eyerys is a Voice of the Customer platform that has been designed with the end user in mind. All important metrics are measured, key drivers are enabled and performance is enhanced.](https://www.smokeci.com/voc-technology-platform)**

**![Eyerys sentiment analysis](https://www.smokeci.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Reporting.png?width=500&name=Reporting.png)**

##### **Creating Data from Verbatim Responses**

The purpose of feedback is to create a channel between you and your customers, allowing them to share their thoughts and experiences so that you can improve service. Transactional customer experience feedback often falls into the category of Quantitative feedback. Traditional reporting and insights help to turn this feedback into actionable insight through, for example, immediate escalations of service delivery failures and data trending.

Feedback surveys are the ideal mechanism to collect feedback data, however, relying solely on data gathered through quantitative questions creates the risk on bias. This form of feedback creates the assumption that what you ask are relevant to what the customer wants to give you feedback on and that you have addressed all potential areas of insight.

The addition of free-form (verbatim) questions is therefore essential. While simple enough, verbatim questions gather feedback that requires many man-hours to identifying themes and tone from which you are able to gather deeper insight into your customer’s emotional satisfaction with your service delivery.

Costly man-hours can be the barrier to gathering such depth of insight, and thus text and sentiment analysis becomes key to understanding your data. Eyerys offers this functionality through the use of IBM Watson, creating an intelligent analysis tool behind an easy to use interface.

***TEXT ANALYTICS | **The process of analysing unstructured text, extracting relevant information for useful business intelligence*

The text analytics functionality of Eyerys automatically categorises feedback into “topics” and then adds these topics to “buckets” based on the most accurate assumption of what the topic relates to. This process of automatically identifying the topics and buckets will help the CX team highlight areas of delight or disappointment for their customers.

*FOR EXAMPLE - A customer leaves a comment that reads “I was on hold for ages before someone answered” Eyerys could identify the topic to be “Call time” which falls into a bucket of “Processes and procedures”.*

Within Eyerys you are able to “teach” the Text analytics engine to group topics into specific buckets that relate to your organisation. This gives you the ability to generate reports and insights directly from Eyerys that are unique to your business, terminology and industry.

***SENTIMENT ANALYSIS**| The analysing of verbatim feedback to determine to what degree an expression is positive, negative, or neutral. *

The process of sentiment analysis determines whether a clients’ verbatim feedback is negative, neutral or positive. Multiple statements can be highlighted in one comment that could be interpreted independently.

*FOR EXAMPLE - A customer leaves a comment that reads “The agent was ok, although the price was ridiculous”. Here the both a neutral and negative statement was made, leaving the overall sentiment as negative.*

Each statement that is analysed in a single comment contributes to the sentiment score for the overall comment as well as the score for each bucket identified within the comment.

The ability to include and interpret verbatim feedback into quantitative surveys provides additional insight and power to your Voice of the Customer initiatives. Listening to the customer in their own words means you are not only hearing them, but truly attempting to understand.

Find out more about how Eyerys can help gather, measure and interpret your customer feedback.

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