Use Narrative Analysis Agent

Modified on Mon, 28 Sep at 10:36 AM

Analyze

Sometimes a summary is not enough and you want to ask specific questions about your comments. Narrative Analysis Agent lets you do exactly that, then follow up, dig into specific groups, and pull real examples as you go.

 

At Perceptyx, we are always working to improve our products and ensure accuracy in our AI features. However, artificial intelligence may sometimes produce inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated results. We recommend reviewing any AI output for accuracy and suitability before use. Our AI is intended to assist, not replace, human review or professional advice.

Before you start

Narrative Analysis Agent is an optional feature that must be enabled by Perceptyx at the subscription level. If it needs to be enabled for your company, your Platform Administrator should contact the Perceptyx Customer Success Manager.

The Narrative Analysis Agent helps bring the story behind your employee listening data together by making it easier to understand key quantitative results and open-ended feedback. Within the agent, AI Insights surfaces key patterns and signals across your survey results, while its conversational analysis capabilities allow you to explore employee comments in greater depth. Learn more about AI Insights.

This article focuses specifically on the Narrative Analysis Agent’s qualitative analysis capabilities. Admin and Creator users can ask natural-language questions about open-ended employee comments from closed Point-In-Time listening events and receive tailored summaries and insights to help guide their analysis.

If enabled for your company, the Narrative Analysis Agent is available for closed Point-In-Time events you have access to. However, platform administrators can disable the agent for individual events.

While Comment Copilot is ideal for quickly summarizing feedback using predefined prompts, Narrative Analysis Agent offers a more flexible, exploratory experience for users who want to dig deeper into the “why” behind the data. It’s especially helpful when you’re investigating specific issues, following up on emerging themes, or looking for examples that bring your insights to life.

One or the other

Organizations can enable either Narrative Analysis Agent or Comment Copilot, but not both.

Narrative Analysis Agent supports more advanced analysis by processing both comment text and relevant demographic metadata. This additional context allows the AI to respond more accurately to your questions, for example, by comparing themes across departments or identifying patterns within specific groups.

What gets sent, and what does not

Narrative Analysis Agent uses generative AI, which leverages OpenAI. When data is sent to OpenAI for analysis, only the comment text and associated demographic attributes, specifically those visible in Advanced Reporting, are included. Please note that neither Perceptyx nor OpenAI train on customer data.

Before any data is sent to OpenAI, we apply our Named Entity Recognition model to automatically mask names found in open-ended comments. This is a critical privacy safeguard required for processing comment data, however, the original, unmasked comments will appear in the interface and in comment dashboards.

For details about our approach to generative AI, see Perceptyx Perspective on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Generative AI.

Narrative Analysis Agent overview

Narrative Analysis Agent empowers you to explore open-text feedback in a flexible and intuitive way. Using a conversational, natural-language interface, you can uncover insights that matter most, whether that’s identifying key challenges, surfacing department-specific themes, or reviewing concrete examples that bring employee voices to life. By making it simple to ask questions and get tailored answers, the agent helps you move quickly from raw comments to actionable understanding.

Narrative Analysis Agent acts as an AI-powered partner that helps you:

  • Ask open-ended questions about all your comment data
  • Explore your data without applying filters first, making it easier to uncover insights you might not know to look for
  • Go beyond summarization to perform a wide range of analyses on comments, from identifying themes to spotting patterns and relationships
  • Receive AI-generated summaries aligned to your query
  • Drill into specific groups, topics, or themes via follow-up questions
  • Request representative verbatim comments for context
  • Provide feedback on AI responses to help refine results

This flexible, iterative experience helps reduce the time and effort required to analyze large volumes of unstructured feedback and helps to ensure the insights you find are aligned to your organization’s unique needs.

Language

Narrative Analysis Agent is currently available in English (United States) only.

The Narrative Analysis Agent welcome screen, with the four prompt buttons across the middle, the Message Narrative Analysis Agent box below them, and View Prompt Library at the top right

Built-in protections

Guardrails ensure query responses remain focused on comment analysis. Minimum response thresholds are also enforced to protect respondent anonymity and prevent potential attribution of individual comments.

Access Narrative Analysis Agent

Who has access

  • Narrative Analysis Agent is an optional feature that must be enabled by Perceptyx.
  • All Event Administrators and Creators have access to Narrative Analysis Agent in events where it is enabled.
  • Your Perceptyx Program Manager may have options to enable it for additional event-specific roles.

You access Narrative Analysis Agent from Advanced Reporting.

  1. Log in to the Perceptyx Platform.
  2. In the navigation bar, click Analyze.
  3. Click View Report in the Recent section or the All Reports table for the closed event you want to analyze.
    Advanced Reporting opens with an option for Narrative Analysis Agent in the left navigation panel.
The left navigation panel in Advanced Reporting, with Narrative Analysis Agent highlighted directly below Report Editor
  1. In the left navigation panel, click Narrative Analysis Agent.
Narrative Analysis Agent open for an event, showing the How can I support you today? welcome message, the four prompt buttons, and the message box

Ask questions, follow up, and explore

When you first open Narrative Analysis Agent, you’ll see four suggested prompts designed to spark ideas and guide your exploration:

  • Overall Summary
  • Top 5 Victories
  • Top 5 Challenges
  • Top 5 Ways to Improve

You can optionally use these prompts to start your analysis or you can go further by entering your own custom questions, such as:

  • What concerns were raised about collaboration in the Product team?
  • How do comments about leadership vary by region?
  • Write a summary of employee feedback that can be shared with the entire organization to acknowledge what we heard.

Need prompt ideas?

For prompt ideas to help you explore your feedback, see the Narrative Analysis Agent Prompt Suggestion Guide. Please note that you must be logged in to the platform to view the guide.

The agent will return a tailored response based on the applicable open-ended comments in the listening event. You can also ask follow-up questions to deepen your analysis. For example:

  • Which departments are most affected by this?
  • What are the underlying reasons for this challenge?
  • What suggestions were shared to improve communication?

As you uncover insights, you can ask the Narrative Analysis Agent to surface specific examples (verbatim comments). You can open the Prompt Library at any time to apply any predefined prompt, without refreshing the page and losing your full conversation history.

Important

If you refresh the browser page or exit the listening event results, the conversation history is not saved.

  1. If you want to use a predefined prompt to start the process, simply click the prompt you want.
    The prompt summary displays.
  2. To explore further, type a question in the Message Narrative Analysis Agent box, then press Enter.
  3. Continue to ask questions to dig deeper and narrow the results to uncover the insights you are looking for.
  4. If you want to apply one of the predefined prompts, click View Prompt Library, select the prompt you want to use, then click Use Prompt. The predefined prompts can be used at any point in your conversation and analysis.

For a more detailed example, see the scenario in the next section.

View a scenario

The following example shows a user starting with a default prompt and then asking a series of follow-up questions to explore one theme in more detail, before pivoting to a different topic and asking a complex question.

Step 1: Use a prompt

The user clicks the Top 5 Challenges prompt to see a high-level summary of key issues across the event.

The agent's response to the Top 5 Challenges prompt, listing five numbered challenges starting with Ineffective Collaboration, with thumbs up and thumbs down feedback buttons below

Step 2: Narrow by department

The user sees “ineffective collaboration” as a challenge and asks which departments are most concerned about collaboration.

A follow-up question asking which departments most commonly cited collaboration as their primary challenge, and the agent's answer naming Sales and Customer Support

Step 3: Focus on suggestions

The agent lists departments with the most collaboration concerns. The user asks what suggestions employees from those departments provided.

A follow-up question asking what suggestions employees from those departments provided, and the agent's numbered list of four improvement suggestions

Step 4: Request example comments

To add context, the user asks to see example comments about cross-department collaboration.

A request for example comments about cross-department collaboration, and the agent's response showing a table of five verbatim comments with a View More Comments button

Step 5: Explore a new topic

The user now asks how employees perceive the company culture.

A new question asking about employee perceptions of the company culture, and the agent's paragraph-length summary of the feedback

Step 6: Ask a multi-layered question

The user asks a complex query that includes a summary of points raised, identification of actionable recommendations mentioned, an analysis of the sentiment, and identification of cross-cutting themes.

A long multi-part question covering main points, recommendations, sentiment and cross-cutting themes, and the agent's two-paragraph response

A few articles that come up alongside Narrative Analysis Agent:

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