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Comment Analysis

One of the most common concerns we hear from our clients is that the sheer volume of open-ended comments from their surveys makes it overwhelming for people to really process and take action. We at Valtera believe that open-ended comments are an extremely valuable source of insight into what is most important to your employees – just as important as the numeric data. As such, we have several techniques to make it easier for your managers to interpret and really understand what their employees are telling them.

Comment Content Coding

In comment content coding, a Valtera consultant reads through your employees’ comments and creates topics based on common themes in the comments. Then, the consultant assigns each employee’s comment to one or more of these topics. This approach allows the end-user to quickly see which areas are of greatest concern to their employees, as well as organizes comments to make them easier to read and interpret.

An alternate approach to comment coding provides employees with a pre-determined list of topics while they are taking the survey so that they may self-code their open-ended comments to a topic. This approach is widely used by many of our clients who find it both easy to implement and cost-effective.

Comment Summary

Comment summaries take content coding one step further by providing narrative summaries of common themes in the comments. Unlike content coding, comment summaries are not typically incorporated into manager reports, but are used at a higher level to gain even more insight into the nature of open-ended comments.

Comment Text Mining

Valtera uses advanced state-of-the-art text analytics to mine open-ended survey responses, identifying key themes and the sentiment of comments. This highly rigorous approach allows us to evaluate rich qualitative data in ways previously cost-prohibitive or unavailable to us. We can even extend our text mining to include qualitative data from other sources, including information gathered through employee, exit, or on-boarding surveys that may already exist.

Originally implemented in customer satisfaction and market research contexts, our text mining solution is one of the first, if not the first, in the HR consulting industry. It is important to note that, though this approach uses software, text mining does not occur in an “unsupervised” manner; rather, consultants work with the software to develop and refine the themes.

We’re very excited to offer this cutting-edge solution to our clients, as we believe text mining will provide our clients with a deeper, richer understanding of their open-ended comments than ever before possible.