Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis reads every open-text response and scores its emotional tone, so you can gauge how customers feel across thousands of comments without reading each one. It runs in the background, labelling each comment Positive, Neutral or Negative. You enable and tune it here in the Admin Panel; the results are explored over in Insights. Admin only
What the three labels mean
Every analysed comment lands in one of three bands:
- Positive — satisfaction and praise. The things customers are happy about.
- Neutral — factual or mixed comments with no clear lean either way.
- Negative — frustration and criticism. These are the friction points worth your attention.
Read sentiment as a trend
Sentiment is strongest as a trend. Watch the balance of positive versus negative over time and across topics, rather than reading any single comment as the whole story.
How it's configured
Sentiment analysis is configured per question, with a set of shared global settings that apply to every question you enable. That means you set the global rules once, then simply switch on the questions you want analysed.
Global settings
- Running user — the user the analysis runs under. You must set this before you can enable any question.
- Positive threshold (default 0.25) and Negative threshold (default −0.25) — these decide how strict each label is. A comment scoring above the positive threshold is labelled Positive; one scoring below the negative threshold is labelled Negative; anything in between is Neutral.
Raising the positive threshold makes the Positive label stricter (fewer comments qualify); lowering the negative threshold makes the Negative label stricter. The defaults are a balanced starting point for most organizations.
Keep your questions consistent
Use Apply to all to push the running user and thresholds to every question you've already configured, in one go. If your questions currently have different values, you'll see a notice prompting you to set the values and Apply to all so they're consistent.
Enable it
Set the global settings
Choose the running user and, if you want, adjust the positive and negative thresholds from their defaults.
Find your questions
Search by workspace, survey or question to locate the open-text questions you want to analyse.
Switch them on
Toggle a single question, or turn on All at once. The global settings are applied to each one you enable.
Watch the results
Sentiment scores flow into the Sentiment Analysis report, where you can track the tone over time.
Each question you've configured shows when it has been analysing since and when it last ran, so you can see at a glance what's active. Disabling a question keeps its history, so you can resume later without losing what's already been analysed.
Big organization? Add questions on demand
If you run many surveys, the page loads questions on demand to stay fast: use Add a question and pick your way through workspace, then survey, then question, instead of loading everything up front.
Where the results appear
Once sentiment analysis is running, the scores power the Sentiment Analysis report in Insights — an overall tone gauge, the positive / neutral / negative split, a sentiment timeline and the verbatim comments behind each band. See Sentiment Analysis for the full report.
Pair it with topic detection
On its own, sentiment tells you the mood. Combine it with topic detection and you get sentiment per theme — for example, delivery praised while pricing is complained about — which is far more actionable than an overall tone alone.
Related
Topic detection
Sentiment Analysis report
Text analytics in Insights
Data & AI