Using Copilot in Excel to analyze text insights

[GabeHo]

 

I was having a conversation with a small business owner, and they mentioned wanting to have an emphasis on improving customer service and ratings, but the process of reading feedback and survey responses was taking up a lot of time. I often spend time analyzing questions and comments from customers, and it's always a painstaking task dissecting verbatims and identifying themes and insights, let alone develop an action plan to resolve them. With the recent slate of enhancements announced, including Copilot in Excel being generally available, I thought it’d be appropriate to explore some ways Copilot could help make this a much simpler task.



Tip 1: Use Copilot in Excel to summarize unstructured text in a table

Easily one of the best tips that could save you time when trying to dig into and get insights from feedback verbatims is to ask Copilot to do it for you! Whether it’s customer feedback, survey results, or focus group studies, you can simply ask Copilot to summarize the text data.



In this example, I open my spreadsheet with customer ratings and feedback. I then open Copilot in Excel on the top right and ask it to “Please summarize the feedback in this sheet.”



A screenshot of Copilot in Excel summarizing rows of feedback verbatims



Copilot provides a high-level summary of the feedback, group it into different themes. Very quickly, with little effort, we already have some insights that we could start working with!



Tip 2: Add specifics to your prompt to get more precise insights

As we’ve covered in previous editions, how you craft your prompt matters. Let’s say you want to drill down further and get more insights focused on more negative reviews and areas of improvement.

Using the same example data here, you could then write a prompt like, “Hone in on Feedback with Ratings of less than 3, can you summarize this feedback and provide key themes and areas of improvement.”



Copilot first explains what it’s doing:

A screenshot of Copilot outlining how it's going to summarize feedback from responses with a rating of less than 3

Then, based on the focused information, gives me back more detailed and specific information so that I can focus on specific aspects of customer service that I want to address, including tips on how to take action.



A screenshot of more detailed insights focused on neutral to negative feedback analyzed
A screenshot of recommendations by Copilot on how to improve customer service based on the feedback analysis

Just like that, we were able to find insights from raw feedback that would’ve otherwise taken time to parse through manually, and I can instead focus on building an action plan to help address my issues!



Let me know in the comments below how else you've been using Microsoft 365 Copilot, or if there are tips you'd like to see!

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