The four-week plan
- Week 1: Pull 1,000 recent comments from reviews, surveys, calls and social, and read 300 of them with the operations team.
- Week 2: Draft themes on two levels, a broad category and a specific issue, and name an owner for each category.
- Week 3: Test the draft. Two people tag the same 200 comments, and you fix the themes they disagree on.
- Week 4: Go live on new feedback, back-classify the last 12 months and agree a monthly review.
Name owners, not just themes
A theme without an accountable team is just a label. Every top-level category should map to someone who can fix what it describes.
Common pitfalls
- Organising themes by department instead of by what the customer experienced.
- Mixing sentiment into theme names, such as 'rude staff', instead of tagging sentiment separately.
- Building separate taxonomies for surveys and reviews, which makes them impossible to compare.
A taxonomy is never finished. Plan to add or merge a handful of themes each quarter as products, policies and the way customers talk change.
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