This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from a user roundtable attendee survey about agenda preferences. If you want to get valuable insights from qualitative and quantitative data, read on for actionable advice.
Choosing the right tools for survey response analysis
Your approach—and the tools you pick—depend on the data’s form and structure. If you have:
Quantitative data: This includes things you can count, like how many attendees chose a specific agenda topic or rated an item highly. Excel or Google Sheets works just fine for calculating totals and visualizing trends.
Qualitative data: Open-ended responses or detailed follow-ups are impossible to really grasp by hand. Reading through dozens or hundreds of explanations takes forever and you always risk missing patterns. You need AI tools to sort, synthesize, and reveal what’s truly being said.
There are two approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
You can export your qualitative data and paste it into ChatGPT or a similar AI tool, then start chatting about it.
It’s a pretty accessible way to get started and makes it easy to prompt the AI for themes, summaries, or ideas. But realistically, wrangling CSVs, cleaning up text, and manually copy-pasting survey answers isn’t convenient. You easily run into formatting headaches, context limits, or accidental data leaks if you’re not careful.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Purpose-built tools like Specific are designed for this challenge.
You can both collect your user roundtable survey data and analyze qualitative responses with AI, all in one place—no switching between apps. Because Specific asks smart follow-up questions in the survey, you end up with richer, more relevant feedback to analyze. (Read more about automatic AI followups.)
AI-powered analysis in Specific instantly summarizes responses, finds key themes, and turns data into actionable insights—without any manual effort or spreadsheets.
You can chat with AI right inside your results, just like you would with ChatGPT. Plus, you get extra controls to pick which responses go into the analysis, filter by question or demographic, and keep everything organized and collaborative. For more details on how it works, read this feature deep dive: AI survey response analysis.
By adopting an AI-driven survey analysis tool, organizations have dramatically improved the speed and quality of extracting useful insights from open-ended data. AI integration in modern survey tools enables real-time interpretation and immediate feedback for open-ended questions. [1]
Useful prompts that you can use to analyze user roundtable attendee survey responses about agenda preferences
Well-crafted prompts speed up your survey analysis. Below are some favorites, covering key needs for analyzing responses from attendee surveys about agenda preferences.
Prompt for core ideas: Use this to get the main topics or themes from your dataset, ordered by frequency. This is the go-to approach for most survey analyses—including what Specific uses behind the scenes. Copy this straight into ChatGPT or use it as-is in other AI tools.
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
AI always gets better when you provide more context—like explaining the event, your goal, or background on the agenda. Here’s how you can give that context:
You’re analyzing responses from a pre-event survey for our user roundtable. The goal is to refine our agenda and prioritize what matters most to attendees. I want to know what agenda items people care about most, any pain points, and emerging themes.
Dive into themes and get more detail: After seeing the list of core ideas, ask the AI “Tell me more about XYZ (core idea)” to dig deeper into that topic. This breaks down broad themes into actionable insights.
Prompt for specific topics: Want to see if participants discussed a certain topic? Try:
Did anyone talk about [insert topic]? Include quotes.
Prompt for personas: Segment your attendees into archetypes to tailor the event:
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: Get a direct list of what isn’t working for your audience:
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 & drivers: Learn what’s behind attendee choices for agenda priorities:
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.
Want even more ideas for crafting smart user roundtable attendee surveys? Check resources like best questions for agenda preference surveys or our AI-driven survey generator preset to tailor your next research project.
How Specific analyzes qualitative data by question type
Specific’s survey analysis is fine-tuned for your question format. Here’s what the AI does under the hood:
Open-ended questions (with or without followups): Generates a summary that pulls in insights from all responses and any follow-ups linked to that question. The summary highlights the big themes and supporting points.
Choices with followups: Each option gets its own breakdown. The AI aggregates all responses and follow-ups related to each choice, then summarizes so you see what drove people to pick that agenda topic (or why they didn’t).
NPS (Net Promoter Score): The AI analyzes follow-ups from each category: detractors, passives, and promoters. You see a separate summary for each, catching what turns someone into a promoter—or not.
You can do the same thing manually with ChatGPT, by copying and filtering by question or choice, but it’s a lot more labor-intensive without a purpose-built platform.
For more on question-specific survey analysis, check out this step-by-step guide to building your survey or see how results are handled in our AI survey editor.
Working with AI context limits: How to keep survey analysis efficient
One practical challenge with AI analysis is handling large volumes of data—AIs like GPT have a “context limit,” or a maximum amount of content they can process at once. If your roundtable survey brought in loads of feedback, you might hit this wall. Specific helps you work around it with two built-in strategies:
Filtering: You can filter survey conversations by user replies or specific choices. That way, only responses matching your filter criteria get analyzed by the AI. It cuts through the noise, focuses analysis, and keeps you under the context limit.
Cropping: Select which survey questions get sent to the AI for analysis. By limiting the number of questions, you let the AI focus more deeply (and fit more conversations into its memory window).
You can do this in ChatGPT by manually breaking your data into chunks and pasting only the relevant bits—but that’s tedious and prone to error. Tools designed specifically for user feedback make it much simpler and faster.
This kind of workflow is what sets next-level survey tools apart, making it much easier for teams to get value from big respondent pools. Some of the top-rated AI analysis tools, including NVivo, MAXQDA, Canvs AI, and Looppanel, offer built-in ways to manage data splits for AI processing. [2]
Collaborative features for analyzing user roundtable attendee survey responses
Survey analysis is a team effort, but collaborating on user roundtable attendee agenda preference surveys can be messy—everyone has a slightly different focus, and keeping track of “who analyzed what” is a headache.
Collaborative AI Chat: With Specific, you can chat directly with the AI about your survey data—no need for side documents or Slack threads. Every analysis chat shows who started it, which filters are applied, and what questions are being discussed.
Multiple chat threads: It’s easy to spin up several parallel conversations on different slices of your survey results. Each chat remains distinct, making it clear which persona or agenda topic is being explored, and by whom.
Real-time accountability: When collaborating with teammates, each chat message in Specific shows the sender’s avatar. It’s clear who said what, so you never lose track. These features are all about working smarter together on survey insights—in real time, and all in one place.
Create your user roundtable attendee survey about agenda preferences now
Unlock fast, actionable insights by using AI-powered analysis and rich, chat-based survey tools—get started today to deliver a better user roundtable experience that’s truly shaped by your attendees.