Change the topic's wording when findings are about the wrong area, and check four things when something your customers say never arrives.
What you are looking at
Two states, and they are answered in different ways.
In the first, a finding has been delivered whose quotes describe an experience outside the area you meant. That state is answered by changing the topic's wording.
In the second, your customers say something and no finding is about it. There the wording is one of four things to check.
Findings about the wrong thing
A finding about the wrong thing usually means the saved wording still covers that experience. It can also rest on feedback collected before an earlier change to the wording.
Read the quotes under the finding, and note the experience they describe. Under each section are up to five quotes from the feedback the finding rests on. How to read them is in The evidence behind every finding, article 18.
On Topics, select the topic. Its page shows the wording in four parts: What this topic covers, Examples, What to leave out and Edge cases. Decide which part covers the experience in those quotes.
Select Change this topic on that page. Changing the wording, testing it and saving it are in Sharpen a topic, article 19. A delivered finding carries a Change this topic link too, and it opens the same wording.
Change the part you chose. Narrow What this topic covers to the area you meant. Or add a line to What to leave out for the experience you do not want. Or write an Edge cases ruling for the borderline: what belongs, what does not, and what decides between them.
Test the new wording against the feedback the finding quotes, before you save it. When a second topic covers a neighbouring area, change the wording of both, and read where each one collects from.
Open the tool the wrong findings were delivered to, and close or remove them there, the way you close any other item in it.
Something you expected that never arrived
You know your customers say something, and no finding is about it. Four things keep that subject out of findings, in the order to check them. When no finding of any kind has arrived, start with Nothing has arrived yet, article 28.
Read where the topic collects from. On Sources, the topic lists the tools it collects from, and an imported file is not listed there. Feedback written anywhere else is not collected: on a phone call, in a Slack channel you did not select, or in a tool with no source.
Read whether the words are the customer's own. Feedback whose subject is a system or a process, a report someone else wrote about customers, or a message written for internal routing, is not read into findings.
In the source itself, count how many separate pieces of feedback say the thing you expected. A finding is written only when every part of it is supported by quotes from at least three separate pieces of feedback. One long message is one piece of feedback, however much it says.
Select Change this topic on the topic's page, and test the wording against real examples of the missing feedback. An item marked Off topic usually carries a reason under it, and the reason names the part of the wording to change.
The fix has worked when
- the topic's page shows the wording you saved;
- the feedback you pasted into the test is marked the way you expect;
- after the next cycle, the topic's row on the Overview lists a new entry under Cycles, with the pieces of feedback it read and the pieces it kept.
What happens next
The wording you saved is used from the next cycle. A cycle does not start until about twenty new pieces of feedback have been collected for the topic, so at low volume the change shows in weeks rather than days.
Feedback that was already read is not read again. A finding written after the change can still quote feedback collected before it. Findings already delivered stay in the tools they were delivered to.