Statistically speaking you’ve selected a random sample out steam and took the responses that was given spontaneously and in a open ended questionnaire. What you’ve done we can translate to IDI (in depth interviews) but without any structured guideline (which is highly not recommended).
Guidelines would limit the set of responses. If you are out fishing for the most comprehensive list of input no limits should be applied.
You can then take items of interest gathered from such a wide sample and develop a more limited approach and take various customer groups into consideration.
have no statistical meaning.
That is not entirely true. Items with extremely low frequency are to be considered irrelevant.
I’ve said guidelines are highly recommended, not essential.
Again, as someone who work with this for living, your action of grouping and summarizing the trend topics was one of the most productive things I’ve ever seen in this community.
But I’ve to disagree with this statistical point of view of gathering unstructured data and combining because it simply doesn’t work to fish conclusions. Is it excellent to gather assumptions? Yes! Definitely! With assumptions gathered and questionnaire properly structured, then you run an actual survey.
Open ended comments lacks in depth without a guideline because there are several nuances of “people” in the world. Some folks need to be explored by instigating their feelings with structured questions because they are too closed.
Again, my suggestion is that the company use their resources that I’m sure they have due to the amount of sales and get to know about their customer satisfaction level.
Nevertheless thank you for sharing your results.
