Keyword Themes: Advanced Tips and Tricks to Help You Navigate your Customer Feedback

1. Keyword Themes: A Refresher!

2. How We Process Special Characters: 

• Social Characters (# and @)
• References to Currency
• Percentages
• Contractions and Plurals
• Hyphens
• Other Common Characters

3. Multi-Word Keyword Themes: Sequence-matching and applying AND rules

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Keyword Themes: A Refresher!

Keyword themes allow you to build rules that include keywords and phrases, as well as specifying exclusions, so that you can classify your data based on specific language being used. They are especially useful when:

• Identifying references to entities (rather than issues), such as product names, particular services, or place names
• Scenarios where the content you want to categorise is described using distinct words that don't typically occur in other contexts

Effective examples of keyword themes include terms like "Disney+", "Borough of Westminster," or "council tax," where the theme is focused and unambiguous.

 You can read more about use cases for keyword themes, as well as other themes and their nuances, in this article. 

How We Process Special Characters

The customer feedback that you gather is often littered with strange and wonderful special characters (e.g. @, #, &) that we process and/or remove to make sure we're maximising our chances of matching a keyword to verbatim. This means we can calculate volume and sentiment scores with as high an accuracy as possible 💪

When processing verbatim we apply a specific set of rules for handling special characters at the beginning or end of words or numbers, as well as between consecutive words and numbers. These rules are designed to be invisible, and to apply seamlessly in the background, reflecting real-world feedback patterns and the way customers naturally write feedback responses. 

• At the same time, we also apply our logic to any themes that contain characters, for example Disney+. In other words, our rules apply to both sides of the proverbial CX coin.

To make sure you’re getting the best results - and unlocking clearer, more actionable insights - we’ve pulled together some practical guidance for handling specific characters that can especiallu influence your keyword searches. Take a look at these tips to help you sharpen your themes and pick up on everything that matters!

 

Social Characters: # and @

Our platform will always retain all social characters at the start of a word. This means that the character must appear in both the theme and in verbatim for the terms to match and, therefore, be reported. If only a keyword theme OR verbatim contains the character, a match will not be registered.

❗ Want to include social matches in your results? > Make sure you've created keyword themes to specifically catch tagged examples.

 

References to Currency

Our platform will always preserve currency symbols at the beginning of numbers. For a match to be reported, the symbol must be present in both the keyword theme and the verbatim; if the character appears in only one, no match will be recorded!

At the same time:

• Numbers must match exactly. Partial or approximate matches (such as differences in magnitude) will not be recognised as a match.
• We automatically remove commas from any numbers in keyword themes or verbatim to ensure precise matching.

 

Percentages

Percentages at the end of numbers will be preserved as they are. This means that the symbol must be present in both the keyword theme and the verbatim, for it to be recorded; if the character appears in only one, we don't recognise a match!

 

Contractions and Plurals

Unfortunately we won't automatically detect plurals in verbatim because, at times, this can obfuscate whatever you're looking for e.g. custom and customs can mean very different things!

As a result, if (for example) you're looking for the keyword inspector, but also want to find references to inspectors, you'll need to create two keyword themes - one of which accounts for the plural term. 

However, what we will do is some behind-the-scenes magic to find and return verbatim that contains the contractions 's and 'll to make sure we're catching all the more cases of your singular terms!

 

Hyphens

The Wordnerds platform will perform the following:

• Automatically replace a hyphen with a space (thereby separating the words).
• Automatically (and invisibly!) wrap hyphenated words in "" to make sure we only return results that have all words in the correct sequence.
  
  

The benefit of this is that we can return much more verbatim that might otherwise be lost to variations in how it's typed. If you are creating keyword themes that contain hyphenated words as well as other words, you may want to consider explicit phrase matching using "".

Other Common Characters

As standard we will also

• Preserve ampersands between words while inserting a space either side of the character
• Remove exclamation and question marks at the ends of words and numbers

 

Multi-Word Keyword Themes: Sequence-Matching and applying AND Rules

Multi-word keyword themes are processed differently depending on whether you wrap the words in quote marks (" ") or not.

• When wrapped in quotes, we refer to your term as being sequence-matched. When this occurs, our platform will look for those words appearing in the exact same sequence within the verbatim, after we've handled any special characters as usual. This ensures you're matching the specific phrase you’re after, just as it appears.
• When not wrapped in quotes, we treat each word as a required match, so all the words must show up somewhere in the snippet for the theme to register, but they don’t need to appear in any particular order. You can think if this as applying an 'AND' rule between each word!

Our platform will guide you on these variations accordingly:

 

Have More Questions? Or, Want to Learn More About Keyword Themes and how to Supercharge Your Themes?

Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager - we're always more than happy to help!

 

✍️ Article written by Izzie, Product Manager