Sainsbury's: when 2 million surveys tell you everything and nothing
When you receive millions of survey responses a year, the hard part isn't collecting feedback — it's finding the signal. Here's how Sainsbury's CSAT & Customer Closeness team made sense of it all.
Sainsbury's CSAT & Customer Closeness team handles more than two million CSAT survey responses a year, plus social media and hundreds of thousands of complaints and contact-centre messages. Their existing tools needed predefined categories and kept feedback in silos — so emerging themes went unseen and most qualitative comment went unused.
Every week, tens of thousands of comments arrived across surveys, social media and the contact centre. The team — led by Amelia and Kat — was responsible for making sense of all of it and turning it into insight the wider business could act on.
But the analytics tools they relied on needed predefined categories. If a theme hadn't been set up in advance, it was effectively invisible. Feedback also lived in separate systems across the business, so no one had a single, joined-up view — and a large share of customers' actual words never made it into a decision.
The solution
Wordnerds gave the team one place to see every channel — and let the themes emerge on their own.
One view of every channel
Surveys, social media and complaints were consolidated into consistent themes, so sentiment could be tracked the same way across every touchpoint.
Topics that surface themselves
Instead of forcing comments into predefined buckets, Wordnerds extracts organic topics from open-ended responses — surfacing emerging issues like cost-of-living shifts in shopping behaviour before anyone thought to look for them.
Trends you can see moving
The team can watch whether a concern is growing or fading over time, and pinpoint which part of the business is moving a score when it changes.
The impact
From drowning in 2 million responses to proactive decisions
By letting themes emerge and tracking them over time, Sainsbury's moved from reactive reporting to anticipating what customers would need next. Qualitative feedback — once underused — became central to decisions, with customers' own words shaping internal communications and strategy.
When a survey score moved, the team could quickly see which themes were driving it and act — adjusting strategy, marketing and customer service before issues escalated.
Automating the heavy lifting of sorting and categorising responses freed the team to focus on interpretation, making the whole programme more scalable. And by bringing qualitative data into the spotlight, customers' direct words became part of how the business talks to itself.
About Sainsbury's
Sainsbury's is one of the UK's largest supermarket chains, operating more than 1,400 stores nationwide and serving millions of customers every week, with annual revenues of over £36 billion.
Its CSAT & Customer Closeness team is responsible for understanding how those customers feel — and making sure the rest of the business hears them.
What would Wordnerds surface from your feedback?
Book a diagnostic and we'll look at your customer feedback together — and show you the themes hiding in it.
So you're reading the footer now? Either you ❤️ Wordnerds or you're desperate for something to read. Either way, CX Corner from Wordnerds is the answer. Fortnightly Voice of Customer bombs dropped in your box. Signup 👇 or find out more.
Avanti West Coast · Transport
Tens of thousands of comments, zero manual tagging
How Avanti West Coast's Voice of Customer team analysed 1.3 million voices across surveys and social — and saved over 7,000 working days of manual tagging.
Sovereign · Housing
10 hours a week back in their pockets
How Sovereign freed 10 hours a week from manual tagging and made Wordnerds an integral part of root-cause analysis for 130,000 residents.
The Guinness Partnership · Housing
Predictive insights from ivy to damp and mould
How The Guinness Partnership turned informal comments about plants into data-driven evidence of damp and mould risk — and moved towards predictive insight.
