Zappi Autocoding
Overview
Coding in market research means analyzing open-ended survey responses (verbatims) by assigning categories, themes, or numerical codes to extract meaningful insights, turning qualitative text into quantifiable data for patterns, trends, and sentiment analysis.
Historically, the costs of processing and deriving insights from the responses have been prohibitive. Coding requires a researcher to read through all comments, develop a code frame (a list of appropriate codes, or topics), then classify the verbatim responses against the codes. This is a slow, manual, and methodical process.
At Zappi, we've automated this process.
Autocoding allows you to:
- Get more value from your verbatims.
- Save time exploring and interpreting open-ended questions.
- Get consistent verbatim analysis (due to reduced human bias).
- Give a customer voice to your test results.
What are open-ended questions, and why are they valuable?
Open-ended questions ask respondents to give free-text responses, known as verbatims. This opens up the research to the full diversity of views held by the wide range of respondents. Researchers can pick up on critical, sometimes unexpected, findings, leading to a better understanding of why an ad or concept has performed the way it has or highlighting areas for optimization.
Open questions encourage more honest, thoughtful answers, and they make for a better survey experience. Respondents feel their opinions matter, and the questionnaire becomes about more than just validating an existing point of view.
How does it work?
Zappi’s data scientists have explored neural networks to develop an autocoding functionality that enhances the coding process; a neural network is a computing system that is loosely modeled on how the human brain learns and makes decisions.
Autocoding is used on open-ended questions like, “What do you like?” , “What do you dislike?” and “What are your suggestions for improvements?”.
By leveraging automated translations, we’ve enabled Autocoding in all the languages in which our products are available; verbatims from non-English studies are translated into English before being autocoded. Autocoding charts let you toggle between English and the language in which the studies were originally fielded.