How to Build a Stronger Tagging Taxonomy for Analyzing Customer Feedback

Ticket tagging is a staple process for extracting insights from customer support conversations. With a well-thought tag taxonomy, can track common customer concerns as they unfold and create valuable insights for improving your products and services! When used smartly, tagging taxonomy can also assist in analyzing customer feedback and taking the actions necessary to improve a business’s offerings.  

What Is Tagging Taxonomy? 

The concept of taxonomies has come into conversations several times and it usually refers to libraries, tag systems, or methodologies. 

However, when it is applied to customer feedback such as customer support and surveys, it refers to a collection of categories that can be bucketed into feedback. Let’s have a look at an example to understand this. Suppose you are an eCommerce fashion business that is using customer support outsourcing solutions. Upon requesting a report on common customer queries, you find out that customers contact your customer support department for:  

  • Inquiries on deliveries 
  • Payments 
  • Refunds  

These three reasons can be converted into taxonomy with three categories. Whenever each conversation happens, agents can apply the relevant tag (refund, delivery, or payment) and categorize the conversations. When you tag customer interactions, agents can group and analyze them to look for trends. Later on, these trends can help identify and address customer issues proactively. Most outsourcing partners that offer contact center services now have a tagging taxonomy in place to help their clients analyze customer data. 

Creating Tagging Taxonomy for Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is an important aspect of product/service development and quality assurance. Gathering feedback via customer?feedback?software and other means is only one half of the equation. The other half includes analyzing the feedback. However, analyzing this feedback is difficult since customers give feedback in different places such as a support ticket, a survey form, app store, a sales call, and more. 

With a well-established feedback taxonomy, it’s possible to analyze customer feedback on any tag that’s important to the business. However, since taxonomy is an iterative process, it’s difficult to know all possible tags upfront. You might have to go through each customer’s feedback and refine the tags based on what the customer actually meant rather than what they said in the feedback. In other words, the feedback taxonomy needs must be evolved as your business and customer evolve.  


All that customer data gathered is useless if it’s unstructured. Just like workforce management helps strategically allocate people, tagging helps analyze information quickly, efficiently, and accurately. Tagging each piece of feedback accurately and building a robust feedback taxonomy is one way of structuring data for feedback analysis.  

How to Build a Great Tag Taxonomy for Feedback Analysis  

To analyze customer feedback, it’s important to: give structure to the feedback and understand the context of the feedback. Consider these best practices for building a stronger and more efficient tag taxonomy for analyzing customer feedback: 

Categorize the Right Way 

Once the feedback is collected through the use of various customer feedback tools, it must be categorized into common themes. The approach that you choose depends on your business. As a standard, most businesses group customer feedback into 3 main categories: product feedback, customer service feedback, and sales/marketing feedback. 

Each of these categories must have a sub-category. Since we are focusing on customer service, the customer service team at an omnichannel contact center would be interested in finding out about issues such as billing, accounts, usability, etc.   

With categories and sub-categories like these, businesses can break down customer feedback into manageable requests, streamline the process and resolve customer issues more effectively.  

Consider How the Tags Will Be Consumed  

When choosing tag labels, consider how the tags will be consumed. How will your research team search and review these nuggets? This will help build a framework. As you synthesize your research and create themes, consider adding tags within different tag groups. You might discover more themes during this analysis. However, before making new tags, make sure they are usable in the long run and are not too complicated to understand. In short, create only the tags that will be consumed.  

Use Color Codes 

Using color tags is a smart way of organizing a large set of consumer data. Your agents will be able to scan through the highlights quickly and use the data they need without reading into the details of everything.  

You can signal customer sentiments with colors. As you do so, use colors that represent a particular emotion precisely. Red is for anger, yellow is for neutral emotions, blue is for calm, and green is for happiness. Make sure your team knows what colors represent in the tagging taxonomy.  

Test, Review, and Revise  

Once a tagging taxonomy is in place, test different aspects of the structure. The tags and keywords must return the content that is expected when your team performs a search. As the testing continues, the discrepancies in the tags will come to light and you should be able to address them. 

Summing Up 

There is going to be a learning curve with tagging taxonomy and so don’t fret if you have to review and revise the tags from time to time. A tagging taxonomy can make or break an organization’s ability for gaining meaningful customer insights. Be patient while planning and developing a tag taxonomy for analyzing customer feedback. It is unlikely that you will develop a perfect system on the first attempt. 

FAQs 

How to obtain customer feedback?

You can obtain feedback through surveys, customer interviews, instant feedback on your website, and social media.  

Why should you seek customer feedback? 

It’s a way to receive information, insights, input, and issues shared by your customers or stakeholders about their experiences with your company, product, and/or service. 

How to write a customer feedback email?

Start with a good subject line and introduce yourself. Explain the intent of the email, and what the recipient’s input means for your business. Ask them to complete the survey and tell them the estimated time required to complete it. Thank them in advance and end with a signature.  

What tool provides feedback on the customer experience?

Common tools for gathering customer feedback include Type Form, Canny, User Report, and Podium.  

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