🧩 Introduction
When your team receives thousands of survey responses, it’s essential to quickly identify what customers are talking about—without reading each individual comment. Theme Buckets help you automatically group responses based on keywords found in the “comment” field of your surveys.
With Theme Buckets, you’ll gain powerful, high-level insights into customer sentiment: what’s going well, and what needs improvement.
🪜 Step-by-Step Instructions
🔍 Finding and Creating Themes
Note: The permission to add new Themes is "Full access: send and settings"
-
Go to your Dashboard
-
Click on Themes in the left navigation panel
(Theme Buckets exclude comments that are blank) -
Click âž• Add New Theme at the bottom of the list
The "Themes" and "Add New Theme" sections in the Dashboard
-
Enter a Theme Name and add any related keywords or phrases
-
Click Save
AskNicely will analyze all existing survey responses (within the filtered date range) and calculate NPS and volume metrics for that theme.
✏️ Customizing and Managing Themes
-
Default Themes include “price,” “service,” and “speed”
-
You can:
-
Add or remove keywords
-
Rename the theme
-
Delete any theme you don’t need
-
💡 Need help picking keywords? Click on Reports > Keywords in the left panel. This page shows commonly used words among Promoters and Detractors—a great starting point for building effective themes.
đź” Isolating Words
Sometimes a keyword may appear as part of a longer word (e.g., "river" inside "driver" or "screwdriver").
To isolate that word exactly, wrap it in brackets:
✅ This ensures only the word “river” is matched—not any word that includes it.
🧵 Detecting Specific Phrases
If you want to track multi-word phrases like "service center":
-
Create a new Theme
-
Add the full phrase wrapped in brackets:
-
You can also mix phrases with other keywords to capture all relevant responses.
âť“ FAQs & Common Issues
Q: Can I add the same keyword to more than one theme?
A: No—each keyword should be unique to one Theme to avoid double-counting.
Q: Will blank comments be included in Theme analysis?
A: No—only responses with a completed comment field are analyzed for Theme Buckets.
Q: Can I see how often a keyword appears before creating a Theme?
A: Yes! Go to Reports > Keywords to see usage trends for Promoters and Detractors.
Q: Can I edit a Theme after I create it?
A: Absolutely—click the pencil icon next to the Theme to add/remove keywords or rename it.