Feedback taxonomy levels: themes, sub-themes and issues

Why three levels

Feedback taxonomy levels solve a tension. Leadership wants a few stable numbers; teams fixing problems need specifics. One level cannot do both. Three levels let you report at the top and act at the bottom, with everything rolling up consistently.

The three levels

• Theme (L1): a broad area of the experience customers recognise. Staff, Billing, Product, Store, Delivery.
• Sub-theme (L2): a distinct part of that area, usually with a natural owner. Billing > Waiting time, Errors, Payment options.
• Specific issue (L3): a recurring problem or praise in customers' words. Waiting time > Only one counter open at weekends.

Fixed vs discovered

Themes and sub-themes should be defined up front and kept stable, so trends hold. Specific issues change as problems appear and get fixed; they are best discovered by grouping similar feedback within each sub-theme, rather than predicted.

Naming and defining

• Use customer language: "Waiting at billing", not "POS throughput".
• One idea per category.
• A one-line definition with what is in and out.
• Two or three example comments.

Who uses which level

• Leadership: themes, monthly.
• Theme owners: sub-themes, by store and month.
• Store and regional managers: specific issues at their stores.
• Analysts: all three, to keep the structure healthy.

An example

• Theme: Product.
• Sub-themes: Range, Availability, Quality, Fit.
• Specific issues under Availability: Sizes out of stock on weekends; Online stock shows items not in store; New collection sold out in a day.

Common mistakes

• Too many themes: leadership cannot follow more than about ten.
• Sub-themes without owners.
• Predefining specific issues that never occur.
• Renaming levels every quarter.

Common questions

Checklist

• Themes stable and few.
• Sub-themes with owners.
• Issues discovered, not predicted.
• Definitions and examples for each category.

In short

Use themes for reporting, sub-themes for ownership and specific issues for action; fix the top two levels, discover the third, and define every category in customers' words.

How the levels roll up

Every specific issue belongs to one sub-theme, and every sub-theme to one theme, so counts roll up consistently. If staff-attitude complaints rise, the Staff theme rises with them, and anyone can drill down from the theme to the sub-theme to the exact issue and the reviews behind it.

This roll-up is also what lets leadership and store teams talk about the same problem at different levels of detail without arguing about the numbers.

Getting started

Draft eight to twelve themes from a few hundred real reviews, add three to eight sub-themes under each, write a definition and two examples for every sub-theme, and test it by having two people tag the same 200 reviews. Where they disagree, sharpen the definitions. Then let specific issues emerge from the feedback as it is classified.

Expect the first version to change in its first quarter; it settles once real volume flows through it.

Versioning

Give the taxonomy a version number and change log, so every report can say which version it used.

Doing this with Falcon

Falcon builds the theme list from your own reviews, then labels every review against it with a multilingual model, scoring sentiment for each mention and keeping the exact quote behind each label. Texts too short to judge are marked unclear rather than guessed, and low-confidence labels are flagged for a person to check. Negative share by topic, location and month then shows what is rising where, with small samples flagged.