This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses/data from an event attendee survey about registration experience. If you're looking to make sense of open-ended feedback or trends in your event surveys, stick around for pragmatic advice on AI-powered survey analysis.
Choosing the right tools for analyzing survey responses
The right tool for analyzing event attendee feedback depends on the form and structure of your data. For most surveys about registration experience, you’ll gather two main types of data:
Quantitative data: Numbers and selections (like how many people selected each answer). These are easy to count and chart with familiar tools—Excel or Google Sheets are all you need for basic stats like “83% of attendees consider easy registration a critical factor for a positive experience.” [2]
Qualitative data: Open-ended, free-text responses—especially those follow-up questions where people share what’s on their minds. With large surveys, it’s impossible (and overwhelming) to read every reply. To extract themes and core ideas efficiently, you’ll want to leverage AI tools that can summarize, cluster, and analyze text.
There are two approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
Copy-paste and chat: You can export your survey responses and paste them into ChatGPT or a similar AI tool, then ask questions like, “What themes do you see?” or, “Summarize the biggest frustrations about the registration process.”
Drawbacks: This approach is workable for small data sets but quickly gets clunky—ChatGPT’s context limit makes it difficult to handle large surveys, and you have to manually remove identifiers, clean data, and track conversations. It’s not ideal for teams collaborating or for deep dives into filtered subsets of your data.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Purpose-built for survey analysis: Tools like Specific make it seamless. They not only collect survey data in a conversational format but also use AI to summarize results, find core ideas, and deliver actionable insights instantly.
Better data, better insights: By automatically asking follow-up questions, Specific makes sure you get richer responses from each attendee. Follow-up probing boosts your chances of uncovering root causes and actionable suggestions from your audience.
Instant AI-powered analysis: Instead of wrangling spreadsheets, just open your survey in Specific. It instantly summarizes open-ended responses, shows key themes, and makes it possible to chat directly with the AI about your data—just like ChatGPT, but purpose-built for surveys. You can fine-tune context, filter by question or answer, and hand-pick which data gets analyzed. [3]
For more, check out this guide on how to create a great event attendee survey or the best questions to ask about registration experience.
Useful prompts that you can use to analyze event attendee registration experience survey results
One of the best things about using AI for survey response analysis is the flexibility—you can use targeted prompts to extract different perspectives. Here’s how to guide your AI tool of choice (or Specific) to get the best from your data:
Prompt for core ideas: If you want a high-level overview of what your attendees are saying about registration, try this foundational prompt:
Your task is to extract core ideas in bold (4-5 words per core idea) + up to 2 sentence long explainer.
Output requirements:
- Avoid unnecessary details
- Specify how many people mentioned specific core idea (use numbers, not words), most mentioned on top
- no suggestions
- no indications
Example output:
1. **Core idea text:** explainer text
2. **Core idea text:** explainer text
3. **Core idea text:** explainer text
Want the AI to capture more nuance? Always add as much context as you can about your survey, the event type, your goals, or your audience. For example:
We ran this survey at the end of our annual industry conference. The goal is to understand the pain points in the registration process for first-time vs. returning attendees so we can optimize next year’s onboarding. Highlight key differences for both groups if possible.
Dive deeper with follow-ups: Once you’ve spotted a theme (“registration confirmation delays”), follow up with:
Tell me more about registration confirmation delays.
Validate ideas fast: If you want to check if anyone brought up a specific topic or request:
Did anyone talk about mobile check-in? Include quotes.
Here are more prompt ideas that fit event attendee registration experience feedback:
Prompt for personas: Want to understand the different types of people who responded?
Based on the survey responses, identify and describe a list of distinct personas—similar to how "personas" are used in product management. For each persona, summarize their key characteristics, motivations, goals, and any relevant quotes or patterns observed in the conversations.
Prompt for pain points and challenges: If you want a clear issues list:
Analyze the survey responses and list the most common pain points, frustrations, or challenges mentioned. Summarize each, and note any patterns or frequency of occurrence.
Prompt for motivations and drivers: To unpack what really matters to your attendees:
From the survey conversations, extract the primary motivations, desires, or reasons participants express for their behaviors or choices. Group similar motivations together and provide supporting evidence from the data.
Prompt for sentiment analysis: If you want to know the overall mood about your registration process:
Assess the overall sentiment expressed in the survey responses (e.g., positive, negative, neutral). Highlight key phrases or feedback that contribute to each sentiment category.
Prompt for suggestions and ideas: Perfect for generating your “next steps” list:
Identify and list all suggestions, ideas, or requests provided by survey participants. Organize them by topic or frequency, and include direct quotes where relevant.
For even more prompt examples, head to Specific’s AI response analysis feature overview.
How Specific analyzes qualitative data based on question type
Open-ended questions with or without follow-ups: Specific generates a comprehensive summary for all responses to each open-ended question and follows up on related prompts, letting you see themes at-a-glance, even for messy, unstructured input. This means the AI condenses hundreds of nuanced replies into a clear digest without you reading everything yourself.
Choices with follow-ups: For questions where attendees select from pre-set options (like “How would you rate registration speed?”), Specific creates a separate qualitative summary for each choice. This lets you see, for example, all feedback related to a “slow” registration experience versus “very fast.”
NPS questions: If you measure Net Promoter Score, each segment (detractors, passives, promoters) gets a tailored summary of comments and follow-ups, making it obvious what’s driving dissatisfaction or advocacy.
You can replicate a lot of this in ChatGPT, but it’s considerably more hands-on and time-intensive, especially for large data sets or if you want team-wide collaboration and filtering.
If you’re building your registration experience survey from scratch, Specific’s AI survey editor lets you custom-tailor every question with simple natural language feedback, speeding up both survey design and actionable insights.
Tackling the challenge of AI context limits
If your event attendance survey generated hundreds (or thousands) of qualitative responses, most mainstream AIs like ChatGPT won’t be able to digest the whole set at once. The context size—how much data the AI can “see” at once—is finite. Here’s how to work around this constraint:
Filtering: Reduce the data set by narrowing focus to relevant segments. In Specific, you can filter for only those conversations where attendees addressed particular questions or answered in a specific way. That means AI analyzes only the important slices, not every response you got.
Cropping questions: Limit the content sent to the AI by selecting only the most valuable questions. In Specific, you hand-pick which questions to analyze, ensuring you stay within context limits and still surface insights across as many responses as possible.
For most standalone AIs, these steps are manual and require a lot of spreadsheet wrangling; with Specific, they’re built right in, making processing faster and less error-prone.
Collaborative features for analyzing event attendee survey responses
Teamwork on survey analysis is tough. It’s easy for context to get lost, comments to be siloed, and for collaborators to duplicate work or miss critical findings. In the world of event attendee surveys about registration experience, this complexity gets in the way of turning feedback into action.
Collaborative chat-based analysis: With Specific, you analyze survey data just by chatting with AI. You don’t have to manage giant spreadsheets, and your questions, prompts, and AI replies live together in context.
Multiple, filterable chats: You and your teammates can open multiple analysis threads. Each chat can have its own set of filters—say, focusing only on people who registered on mobile, or only on responses from premium ticket holders. In every chat, you can see who started the analysis and who’s asking which questions, preventing confusion and promoting transparency.
Who said what—at a glance: Every message in your AI chat is tagged with the sender’s avatar, making it instantly clear who contributed what. This makes cross-functional collaboration (marketing, ops, CX, research teams…) more intuitive and streamlined.
Keep everyone aligned, instantly: No more accidental duplication, no missed insights. Shared conversations, filterable views, and easy “who asked what” tracking all reduce overhead and let you focus on what matters: surfacing and acting on event attendee feedback about registration.
Create your event attendee survey about registration experience now
Make informed decisions and deliver a seamless event registration experience—start by creating your own conversational survey that reveals attendee insights you can actually use, fast.