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Survey Analysis Tools & Softwares
How you approach your survey analysis, and the tools you use, will determine how meaningful the results are.
On this page we've listed the best tools for the job, and the best practice for your analysis. Get started by scrolling down to learn what's on this page.
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SentiSum
SentiSum is an all-in-one tool for customer feedback text & sentiment analysis. If you want just surveys, that's fine. If you want to plug in all your other feedback channels—you're also in luck!
On this page
On this page, we've listed a ton of useful tools that help with survey analysis. We've also added some best practices from around the internet to advise on which tools to choose for your use case.
Skip ahead:
- Wall of Survey Wisdom
- How to choose a survey analysis tool
- Types of survey analysis
- Free survey analysis tools
- Survey analysis visualisation software
- Best all-round tools for complex survey analysis
- Best tools for thematic or text analysis
- Best survey sentiment analysis tools
- SentiSum's survey analysis software
Wall of Survey Wisdom
Check out these golden nuggets of advice from Quora to guide your survey collection and analysis project.
P.S. This was a huge answer, we've cut a small segment out of it but we recommend reading the whole thing!
• Avoid averages! Averages give average insights. Segments, cohorts, and eliminating certain responses from your evaluation (like the Net Promoter Score® does) are the best ways to get more clarity from your data.
• Avoid aggregate data. Just like with averages, when data is aggregated it loses its ability to give insights. Stick to more meaningful analysis methods like the ones mentioned above.
• Context is key. When comparing numbers, use ratios to understand context. Is 50% a good number? Only in context to some other number.
• If you are trying to measure effects, it’s also important to understand the difference between descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics are just that—they allow you to summarize your data, and typically refer to measures such as sample size, mean age of participants, percentage of males and females, range of scores on a study measure, and so on. Inferential statistics, on the other hand, help you to establish statistical significance by taking into consideration things like confidence intervals and parameter estimations. (Source)
A: The answer depends on how the questions were phrased and how the survey was conducted. the key question is: are the answers from a random selection of the population. if yes (or you can define the population it is representative of) you are good to go. the methods used depend on whether the answers numerical or coded (categorical), multiple response, the level of “missingness" etc.
You can spend many years learning how to do it properly. The short answer is that you look at the responses to find anything that is not random and explain that from your theoretical perspective.
A: The one most important thing -- which so many people don't do -- is figure out what you want to get out of the survey. I like to do this in the form of "goal" questions, as in "after this survey, we will be able to answer the following questions which we can't answer today."
Then, figure out what you need to do to answer those questions -- including what (type of) people should respond and how many of them to get to whatever level of confidence you want, but obviously what you need to ask in the survey in order to answer those questions.
Then, be ruthless about eliminating anything in the survey which won't help you answer your "goal" questions.
There are lots of other things to consider -- how to write good questions, incentives, survey format, etc. -- but if you don't have the goals figured out, none of those other things matter, and the goals are necessary in order to figure out all of those other details.
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Here are 8 Customer Experience Survey Best Practices:
• Word your question clearly.
• Know when and when not to use open-ended questions.
• Avoid questions that yield difficult to interpret, subjective responses.
• Consider your respondents’ experience while determining question order.
• Respond to negative feedback as soon as possible.
• Thank the customers that provide delightful feedback.
• Develop a Board of Customers program, or something similar.
• Make sure that personal questions are marked as optional.
How to Choose a Survey Analysis Tool
Choosing a tool is the most difficult step to take. We suggest gathering a small team and first determining what you want the final results of your analysis to look like. What are your goals? What insights would be useful and for whom? Will these be a one-off project or do you need regular analyses? Do the results have to be real-time and accessible companywide at all times? What budget is reasonable for your use case?
Answering questions like these up front will help you avoid chasing the rabbit down the hole and wasting a ton of your time. Once you've decided a few of the basics, you can start booking product tours with the sales teams at each company.
A key differentiator for us when choosing technology is the relationship and rapport we can build with the solution provider. We want to know we can trust them to hold our hand and teach us the best way of doing things. You want an expert playing on your team when undertaking something as important as a survey analysis and the analysis reporting.
Types of Survey Analysis
There are a number of different techniques out there for survey data analysis. We use these three advanced methods within our AI platform at SentiSum:
1/ Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is the process of detecting positive or negative sentiment in text.
Since customers express their thoughts and feelings more openly than ever before, sentiment analysis is becoming an essential tool to monitor and understand that sentiment.
2/ Keyword or Aspect Analysis
A keyword or aspect analysis identifies specific 'things' in the text. For example, if a customer mentions the word 'discount' it will label or categorize the feedback as being about discounts.
A keyword analysis is very dependent on the language used by the customer, making it prone to error and inaccuracies.
3/ Topic Analysis
Topic analysis, or classification, is a form of AI-powered analytics that reads and analyses like a human does, but considerably faster.
A topic analysis doesn't simply see a keyword, and label the piece of feedback. It takes into account the context of that word and the meaning of the piece of text it sits within. Correct categorisation is not dependent on any specific words used, making the results much more accurate.
For example, a topic analysis tool can identify that a customer is complaining about 'discount code not working' even when they say something like 'the offer didn't apply at checkout'.
Whichever you choose depends on the outcome you desire. Getting deep into the root cause of customer feedback can useful for it to be more actionable—for that you'll want aspect-based topic and sentiment analysis. To understand at a high level why customers are happy/unhappy to guide future research? For that a simple sentiment analysis might be enough.
Free & Open Source Survey Analysis Tools
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MeaningCloud
Put your techies to work and plug into these free text analytics APIs!
MeaningCloud is a little more complex, requiring API integration by your technical team. The free version includes 20,000 requests per month and technical support, with each request you can analyze 500 words.
The analysis may be low accuracy because of the more 'generalist' libraries that the text analytics uses, but it's free and worth testing on your own data!
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Delighted
How Delightful! Delighted by Qualtrics has a free plan, if you have one survey to run and analyze this could be your best bet.
Delighted styles themselves as "fastest and easiest way to gather actionable customer, product, and employee feedback". Whether you're running NPS, CSAT, eNPS or another type of survey, Delighted helps you manage the operations smoothly.
Their free plan allows you to run one project, with 1,000 participants, and when you've finished identify trends in topic and sentiment. Worth a shot for a one off survey!
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Google Forms
Isn't it amazing how much Google gives away for free? Their survey creator is brilliant, and it has some basic analytics built-in.
Google Forms has limited analysis capabilities, however, it has built in data visualisation via charts which can be a great way to start understanding collected data. With one click you can push the form data to Google Sheets where you can use an add-on to do simple text analyses. Click the link below to see MonkeyLearn's Google Sheets add-on for simple analytics functionality.
Excel
Good ol' Microsoft Excel. Sturdy and reliable—although still requires lots of manual work.
Excel is a starting point for anyone wanting to do a rudimentary survey analysis. It's a more manual approach, but for a one off survey it could be just the tool you're looking for. A huge benefit is that most companies will already have the Microsoft software suite—so it's free for you!
Great Software Visualisation Tools for Survey Analysis
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Qlikview
Qlikview helps you quickly view your data! Need we say more?
QlikView is a business intelligence tool for data integration, conversational analytics, and converting raw data into a knowledge base.
QlikView offers features for ad hoc queries and facilitates quick decision-making based on easily accessible information. This software works on the associative model and can go into any direction to search the answers.
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Tableau
You won't get much analysis out of Tableau—but the visualisation is out of this world!
Starting at $70, Tableau is a tool for data visualisation from simple data to complex data. It is kind of interactive and we can suggest labels, tools, size of the column and almost anything we can customise.
The drag and drop interface is really helpful in this software and calculations can also be done in Tableau. Anyone who doesn’t have any idea of analytics can see and understand data from the Tableau platform.
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DisplayR
What an incredible DisplayR of your survey data you'll get. Statistical analysis, machine learning & visualisation all-in-one.
Q by Displayr is data analysis and reporting software. It's designed to make survey analysis & reporting faster and easier. It performs all aspects of the analysis and reporting, from data cleaning and coding through to creating tables and advanced analyses.
It's also tightly integrated with Displayr and PowerPowerpoint for seamless reporting. It's got a lovely FREE option, and the next plan up starts at £1,999. DisplayR's customers seem to like them—they won a G2 top performer badge in Fall 2021!
Best Tools for Complex Survey Analysis
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CustomerGauge
Management your entire process with CustomerGauge: survey collection through to retention.
CustomerGauge is a B2B customer experience management platform that enables clients to:
- Collect customer feedback from multiple stakeholders in an account
- Create custom dashboards for displaying real-time results
- Set goals and targets for closing the loop with customers
- Segment customer insights by region, product, facility, and more.
- and align employees CX
CustomerGauge is also the first and only customer experience management solution that automatically combines customer insights with revenue data.
SentiSum
Survey text & sentiment analytics—and much more juicy, exciting stuff.
SentiSum is a complete solution to customer feedback analytics. They offer granular text and sentiment analysis without the work—the AI algorithms are built by SentiSum especially for your data, so the insights are truly detailed and actionable for your team.
Integration is one-click with your survey provider or help desk, and you'll start seeing results in real-time. SentiSum's super power is the wide range of voice of the customer channels they integrate with.
You can truly create a single source of truth that tells your customer's story across customer support, reviews, and surveys, accessible to anyone in your company to use to underpin their work.
SurveyMonkey
Come for the survey tool, stay for the analytics integrations.
Survey monkey is a leading survey research platform. While there are some basic survey analysis functionalities built in, the best bit about Survey Monkey is their extensive integration library. Have a browse through their marketplace to see what text and sentiment analytics plug-ins you can find.
Survey Tools for Thematic and Text Analysis
SentiSum
Survey text & sentiment analytics—and much more juicy, exciting stuff.
SentiSum is a complete solution to customer feedback analytics. They offer granular text and sentiment analysis without the work—the AI algorithms are built by SentiSum especially for your data, so the insights are truly detailed and actionable for your team.
Integration is one-click with your survey provider or help desk, and you'll start seeing results in real-time. SentiSum's super power is the wide range of voice of the customer channels they integrate with.
You can truly create a single source of truth that tells your customer's story across customer support, reviews, and surveys, accessible to anyone in your company to use to underpin their work.
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Prodsight
Prod, prod—here's a tagging engine for that will automatically analyse your survey results.
Prodsight is a feedback tagging tool that allows you to uncover insights from your survey data. It's a largely self-serve platform with out of the box analytics capabilities, and unlike other similar tools there is still some manual work to get setup.
Once setup, you'll have keyword-based topic and sentiment insights at your fingertips, a great place to start off your CX analysis.
SurveyMonkey
Come for the survey tool, stay for the analytics integrations.
Survey monkey is a leading survey research platform. While there are some basic survey analysis functionalities built in, the best bit about Survey Monkey is their extensive integration library. Have a browse through their marketplace to see what text and sentiment analytics plug-ins you can find.
CustomerGauge
Management your entire process with CustomerGauge: survey collection through to retention.
CustomerGauge is a B2B customer experience management platform that enables clients to:
- Collect customer feedback from multiple stakeholders in an account
- Create custom dashboards for displaying real-time results
- Set goals and targets for closing the loop with customers
- Segment customer insights by region, product, facility, and more.
- and align employees CX
CustomerGauge is also the first and only customer experience management solution that automatically combines customer insights with revenue data.
Best Tools for Survey Data Sentiment Analytics
SentiSum
Survey text & sentiment analytics—and much more juicy, exciting stuff.
SentiSum is a complete solution to customer feedback analytics. They offer granular text and sentiment analysis without the work—the AI algorithms are built by SentiSum especially for your data, so the insights are truly detailed and actionable for your team.
Integration is one-click with your survey provider or help desk, and you'll start seeing results in real-time. SentiSum's super power is the wide range of voice of the customer channels they integrate with.
You can truly create a single source of truth that tells your customer's story across customer support, reviews, and surveys, accessible to anyone in your company to use to underpin their work.
Prodsight
Prod, prod—here's a tagging engine for that will automatically analyse your survey results.
Prodsight is a feedback tagging tool that allows you to uncover insights from your survey data. It's a largely self-serve platform with out of the box analytics capabilities, and unlike other similar tools there is still some manual work to get setup.
Once setup, you'll have keyword-based topic and sentiment insights at your fingertips, a great place to start off your CX analysis.
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Lexalytics
For the *super* high volume survey aficionados
Lexalytics is an intelligence platform for those with large volumes of survey results. If you have tons of surveys going out at all times (like 30k per month) or other feedback you want analysed, Lexalytics can bring you insights with their on-premise sentiment and intent analytics technology.
CustomerGauge
Management your entire process with CustomerGauge: survey collection through to retention.
CustomerGauge is a B2B customer experience management platform that enables clients to:
- Collect customer feedback from multiple stakeholders in an account
- Create custom dashboards for displaying real-time results
- Set goals and targets for closing the loop with customers
- Segment customer insights by region, product, facility, and more.
- and align employees CX
CustomerGauge is also the first and only customer experience management solution that automatically combines customer insights with revenue data.
The Winning Survey Analysis Software—Spoiler: it's us!
SentiSum
SentiSum is an all-in-one tool for customer feedback analysis. If you want just surveys, that's fine. If you want to plug in all your other feedback channels—you're also in luck!
SentiSum is a web-based AI analytics tool for customer feedback data. With one-click, integrate one or all of your survey, reviews, and customer support conversation channels, to get real-time text and sentiment insights presented back to you.
SentiSum's customised AI algorithms give you a quantitative understanding of the topics and sentiment expressed by the customers you've surveyed.