The past month has seen another wave of new features delivered across the platform, with the three focus areas in SurveyOptic for the month: smarter verbatim analysis, automated survey operations, and platform security. We also completed our annual ISO27001 and ISO9001 audits and Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus recertifications! Here is what the changes mean:
Verbatim Theme Summary: From Raw Text to Clear Themes
What is Verbatim Theme Summary?
Open-text answers are often the richest source of insight in a survey, but they are also the hardest to access at scale. The initial reading of thousands text responses is slow, and important patterns can easily get missed. Theme Summary solves this problem.
The Summary tab groups response by meaning, using the same technology that powers the tagging view. It identifies the main distinct themes, each showing response counts, representative quotes, keywords, and the balance of sentiment. When there are fewer answers, SurveyOptic gracefully falls back to the plain summary.
This complements the advanced respondent clustering that also shipped in August. The clustering includes silhouette analysis, and can now include text analysis alongside quantitative responses, helping you find groups of like-minded respondents with similar experiences in a repeatable, explainable way.
What’s New
- Automatic theme extraction – The Summary tab groups verbatims by meaning as soon as the data is ready.
- Respondent counts per theme – See how many people raised each topic to understand the share of voice.
- Quotes, keywords and sentiment – Each theme includes representative quotes, keywords, and sentiment.
- Graceful fallback – Small datasets automatically fall back to the existin summary.
- Advanced respondent clustering – clustering now incorporates text answers to surface groups.
Why this matters
You no longer need to choose between the depth of open-text feedback and the speed of headline metrics. Theme Summary turns thousands of free-text answers into a set of themes in a fraction of a second, while clustering finds hidden segments that other techniques would miss. For large surveys this means employee voices are heard without delaying the report. Just as importantly, the data never leaves our data centres or the platform when it is analysed, and it is never used to train AI.
Real-time Progress Tracking and Reusable Dashboards
Why Survey Operations Matter
For recurring surveys and large-scale listening programmes, the timeliness and accuracy of completion rate tracking and easy reporting set up are essential.
What’s New
- Copy dashboards – Dashboards can now be easily used as report templates, making it easy to replicate setups across repeated surveys or even different projects, and then tailor them to your new current scenario.
- Completion rates for complex hierarchies – When a dashboard is filtered to part of the organisation, the completion rate matches by that group’s head count. This works for hierarchies, virtual teams, geography and any other structuring you choose to apply, as many levels deep as you want to go.
- Automatic report rescoring – When you edit response scores, any existing responses are now rescored for you, automatically.
- CSV question import – Survey editors can now import questions from CSV files, speeding up survey build for large questionnaires. Just drop in your example data and the survey questions are automatically set up for you.
- Lighter response activity tracking – A new analytics engine gives survey managers an operational picture of fieldwork progress without loading any of the response answers. This enhances privacy, speeds up the process, and reduces the CO2 footprint. On a 20,000-response survey this replaces megabytes of data with a lightweight report view of a few hundred bytes, so charts load faster and reports feel even snappier.
Why this matters
Reusable dashboards cut setup time for repeated surveys. Accurate, hierarchy-aware completion rates give managers rapid, trustworthy progress data for their teams. Faster response tracking means you can monitor fieldwork in real time, even on the largest surveys, without waiting for heavy pages to load.
Plus: Platform Optimisation Behind the Scenes
Alongside these user-facing changes, August saw more than 700 code improvements across the platform, with additional layers of security scanning, testing and prevention in our quality and security audited development process. Test coverage and security scanning were also deepened across our entire infrastructure. For everyone using the platform, the benefit is a reliable, secure platform that stays fast as your survey programmes grow, and is protected against the increasing security threats from AI.
Coming Up
Dashboard refinements, expanded automation, and continued improvements to text analytics are coming through September. You might also spot some changes to our timeline-driven action planning platform.
Questions? Find us at support@socialoptic.com or in the chat.