What is Research Hub and Research Projects

Research Hub is Survicate's research and analysis product.

It gathers, categorizes, and analyzes feedback from multiple sources to automatically detect customer sentiment, identify technical issues reported by users, and help you better understand your customers' needs and wants.

It allows you to use this data to run Research Projects - a focused analysis built around a specific research question. You define the question, choose which feedback sources to include, and run the analysis on your terms.

Research Projects are a targeted investigation: validating a hypothesis, understanding why a metric moved, or building the case for a roadmap decision.

With Research Hub, you can do both long-term (continuous) and short-term (one-time) research - the Hub is here to support you in summarizing and making sense of the feedback, in a given context.

In this guide, you'll learn about:

what feedback sources you can connect to the Research Hub to base your research project on,
what part does AI play in analyzing the feedback,
how the Research Agent can assist you to get even better results.

Update your context

To run a research project, it's important to know the context of:

your products and features
your customer personas
your positioning.

The first time you open Hub ➡️ Context, you'll see the Enhance AI insights window. Enter your company website and click Fetch company knowledge to fill in your context automatically, or click Skip for now to do it later.

You can edit your context at any time in Hub ➡️ Context:

Here, you can update your company details (name, website, description, Help Center URL, and changelog URL), and add Product areas and Personas:

The AI will use this context when synthesizing your feedback, so the reports reflect conclusions relevant to your actual business rather than generic summaries.

This information enables more accurate analysis of feedback and generates insights that are tailored to your specific needs.

Data sources

A feedback source is an external tool where your customers leave opinions, reviews, or requests. Those can be review pages, customer calls, and chats, or surveys.

Instead of keeping the feedback scattered across many tools, sync them to the Research Hub to get an overview of what your customers are telling you.

Navigate to Hub on the left-hand side of your Survicate Panel.

Click Data sources at the bottom of the Research Hub sidebar:

Here, you can connect integrations to automatically import customer interactions, call recordings, or reviews, as well as add or upload feedback manually.

💡 On the right, the Data summary shows how much feedback was added in the last 30 days against your monthly limit, with a breakdown by source and time range.

You can connect many sources to your Research Hub to consolidate and analyze data from many tools.

The Research Project Report will be in English, but feel free to upload feedback and data in any language(s).

Keep reading to learn what you can achieve with each feedback source!

Integrations

Connecting an integration lets you automate the flow of feedback from the source you choose.

Click Data sources at the bottom of the Research Hub sidebar:

On the next page, select Integrations and connect any of the available feedback sources:

More information about each of the available Research Hub integrations and their setup instructions can be found in our dedicated guides.

💡 Some of the integrations are only available on selected subscription plans.

Other ways to import feedback

In addition to importing and analyzing survey feedback, you can also analyze feedback collected from other external sources, such as:

Transcribe a recording

Transcriptions allow you to import audio and video files from your device. Research Hub transcribes the file and extracts insights. You can store and analyze the insights along with feedback from other sources.

The Research Hub not only saves you time and the need to manually go through every call or interview, but also lets you know what issues or subjects customers talk about.

The features allows you to upload files in any language!

Click Data sources in the Hub and go to Transcripts:

Click on Transcribe recording, upload or drag & drop an audio or video file from your device.

The maximum size of the uploaded file can be 2GB. Supported formats are .mpa, .mpeg, .mp4, .wave, .wav, .ogg.

After the file is uploaded, you'll be asked to select the language of the audio or video and click Start transcription:

The uploaded file will be transcribed in a matter of seconds - after a moment, you will see the transcription added to your Research Hub as a piece of feedback.

Open this piece of feedback to see the insights we automatically extracted from the file. In the transcript view, you can:

read the whole transcript, divided into speakers,
listen to the recording or watch the video, while the highlighted text follows the conversation,
click any fragment of the text to jump to that moment in the recording,
search inside the transcript,
name speakers and rename the transcription file.

💡 Watching the video is especially useful when the interviewee shares their screen to explain something.

📌 Depending on your subscription plan, transcription length limits apply.

Upload a file

Click on Data sources and go to Files:

Click Import file and select the file you wish to upload. We support CSV, TXT, MD, MDX, PDF, and DOCX files, up to 20MB:

💡 If you're uploading a CSV file, all feedback in the uploaded CSV file should be in one column. Otherwise, some of it won't be imported.

Please note that text fields should be surrounded by quotation marks (") in the file.

Other columns of the imported file can include additional data, such as User traits, Response traits, and Topic names that you can map to your preferred fields in the Hub:

The first two fields in the pop-up window are mandatory to fill out. Here, you can specify which column of your CSV file is the feedback you wish to import, and what date should be assigned to the pieces of feedback.

Additionally, you can map data from the file's certain columns as user or feedback attributes, which will be visible next to each feedback piece in the Hub.

When importing a CSV file, you can choose a column that contains predefined Topic names. Research Hub will automatically recognize the values in that column and create the Topics you uploaded. If you already have some Topics in your Hub, it will assign feedback pieces to those existing Topics.

Please note that there is a limit of 200 unique topics per file. If the file contains more than 200 topics, the column cannot be used for import.

Adding more feedback sources

At any point, you can click on the Data sources button to connect another data source, upload a CSV file, or a recording to be transcribed.

Check out this section of our Help Center to read more about feedback sources available in the Research Hub.

🚀 Feedback will appear in the Research Hub in real time.

Create and set up a Research Project

1. In Hub, click + New research project in the top-right corner:

2. If you haven't added any Data Sources beforehand, you will be asked to do so in the next step:

Read more about available data sources here.

3. Choose either a One-Time Analysis or Continuous Monitoring:

One-Time Analysis is the best choice when you'd like to:

validate a feature request, based on customer feedback, before you add it to the roadmap or start building it,
investigate an increase in churn numbers, based on signals your customers provided in interviews or surveys,
build a stakeholder-ready report for a presentation, to showcase data from the last quarter or year.

Continuous Monitoring can be useful to:

track competitor mentions over time, by monitoring which competitors customers mention in Sales calls, or in churn surveys;
track sentiment shifts after a policy or pricing change to be in the loop of how customers are responding.
continuously monitor health signals across the customer base and get notified when problems emerge.

4. After selecting the Project type, you will be asked to choose the Data scope:

All Feedback will build a report based on all available feedback sources you have connected and uploaded to your Research Hub. It allows you to get comprehensive insights from your entire feedback ecosystem.

Selected Feedback will base the analysis on targeted data sets. With this option, you will be asked to select specific surveys, files, and integrations as sources for this Research Project.

5. Next, select the time frame from which the feedback should be taken into account:

6. After clicking Continue, you can optionally add filters to narrow down the data that will be used to build the research report:

For example, it's possible to build the report only based on feedback that mentions support and has Negative sentiment:

The and operator between the filters can be changed to or by clicking on it.

At any stage of creating a Research Project, you can click on Save draft and come back to it later from the main page of the Research Hub:

7. Describe the Research Project's goal, or click Inspire Me to use one of our ready-to-use prompts, prepared for different personas:

Filling out this step will help us build the best-suited report for your project.

Click Continue in the top-right corner to go to the next step.

8. On the next page, review all the requirements for your Research Project and either:

edit any of the steps by clicking on them in the top row:
or click Run Research:

9. Once the Research Project's report is ready, you'll see it in the Research Hub, as well as get an email to your address:

After a project is created

When your Research Project is created, you will see the following tabs:

In this section of the article, we'll look into each one of them.

Report

The Report is the main part of the project, as it's created based on the information and criteria you provided while adding a new project.

The Report comes as a draft, which you are free to edit manually, edit with AI, enhance with tables, charts, and more:

The report also includes references to feedback pieces, ensuring an easy way to read more about each point or claim of the report.

💡 Type / in the report to add blocks, such as a chart based on your tracked Insights or a Table of contents. You can also add hyperlinks and images to your report.

Approving the report will still allow you to edit it later if needed, but it's required to be able to Share the report with your teammates:

Insights

All data you decide to send to the Research Hub from various sources will be presented as pieces of feedback for you to analyze.

Additionally, feedback is automatically categorized into Insights. Use the filters at the top to switch between Tracked, AI discovered, and Resolved Insights. You can also add your own Insight with + Add insight:

Each Insight contains a subject that appears across your data, with key findings and a description of what your customers mention.

Feel free to Track, and then Pin, Edit its description, Mark Resolved, or Delete an Insight:

Click on an Insight to display even more details about this topic (Summary), as well as Feedback pieces that have been the basis of creating this Insight:

Next to the Insight's description, you can also see:

Added - the date the Insight was created.
Mentions - the number of times a piece of feedback was marked as relevant to this Insight.
Last 30 days - how many times did this Insight come up across your feedback over the past 30 days - together with Mentions, it allows you to spot whether this topic has been occurring for a while, or just came about in the recent month.

A Tracked Insight can be edited to better match your needs or project, as well as pinned to highlight that it's something you want to address or come back to later.

A Pinned Insight will be placed at the top of the Tracked insights for easier access. You can pin an Insight to make sure that it won't disappear when new feedback causes Insights to be regenerated (in Continuous Projects).

A Resolved Insight can mean that you have already addressed the topic it raised, and it can later be found in Resolved:

If you don't like the AI-discovered Insight, it can simply be deleted from the list.

The Report and Insights are in English, regardless of the language(s) of the feedback.

Research Agent

The Research Agent can answer your question based on data from various sources that you used in this Research project.

It can also help with Survicate-related product questions!

To open the Agent, click on Ask Agent in the bottom right corner of your research project in the Hub:

💡 You can select a fragment of the report, and the Agent will focus on this given fragment to answer your question in context.

You can also ask follow-up questions if the first answer isn't clear or suitable enough.

Data

Go to the Data tab of your Research Project to see which feedback the project uses. If the project is based on All feedback, everything you add to Research Hub (survey responses, files, integration imports, and transcripts) is included automatically. Click Filter sources to limit which feedback is taken into account:

💡 Adding, filtering, or removing Data sources may regenerate the Report and Insights.

Setup

Go to the Setup tab of your Research Project to see the Project's name (it's editable), type, sources, description, and more:

Here, you can also delete the whole Research Project.

Folders

You can create multiple folders for your research projects.

1. To create a folder, click on the + sign in the top-left corner of the Hub:

2. By default, new projects are created in the Default folder. To move a project to your chosen folder, click on the three dots and select Move to folder:

or select a couple of projects and click here:

In folders, you will also find a list view showing the project details: Project name, Author, Last update date, number of Datapoints, number of Tracked Insights, and Status.

Feel free to filter and sort by those properties for the best view:

💡 The project list remembers how you sort and filter it. When you come back later, your projects show in the same order and with the same filters.

Security and access to data and projects

To ensure privacy and security for the feedback you import to the Research Hub:

We utilize best practices when it comes to data encryption,
Our infrastructure is hosted on AWS, so the ISO 27001 and SOC 2 ensure the security of our infrastructure,
We use OpenAI Enterprise API. They do not train models on your data,
Development and maintenance of our product are ISO 27001 certified,
When building products and features, we consult all things related to customer data with our Security Team,
All Research Hub integrations utilize OAuth 2.0 connections.

By default, all teammates in your Survicate workspace have access to the Research Hub and all Research Projects.

You can control it by disabling Research Hub access to newly invited, or existing, teammates.

Go to the Teammates tab, click on one of the Teammates, and disable Research Hub access in some or all workspaces (if your Survicate account has multiple workspaces):

Click Save to keep the changes.

💡 When you add members to a workspace, you can type any email address, even if it's not on the list. New people get an invitation, and teammates who are already in your organization just get access to the workspace. Either way, the Role and Research Hub access you set are applied.

Use Research Hub with Boards

With our Boards, you can create Research Hub widgets, showcasing data about your Insights, such as:

over-time trends for Insights;
sentiment distribution among all feedback or specific Insights;
feedback distribution by a custom attribute.

Create Boards that provide a clear and structured way to analyze your Insights:

FAQ

How does the Research Hub differentiate between actionable insights and irrelevant feedback?

Firstly, we use large language models (LLMs). We train the system to concentrate on genuinely important information rather than just what's popular in the dataset.

For example, when importing conversation data from Intercom we filter them, so that only relevant insights get into Survicate.

When chatting with the Research Agent, it has the access to all your survey results, but when categorizing single pieces of feedback into Insights, we focus only on survey responses that contain open-text feedback.

Finally, the UI and UX let you explore your feedback in a extremely efficient way, so that you can easily focus on what's relevant and quickly skip trends that are irrelevant to your inquiry.

How does the Research Hub handle feedback in various languages?

You can import data from various sources in any language. The feedback pieces will be visible in the Hub in their original language, while the Insights and Report will be in English.

How often are the Insights updated?

Insights in each Research Project are regenerated when new data comes in that influences the existing insights or can be used to generate new insights.

After you connect sources, feedback will appear in the Research Hub in real time. Additionally, if you upload data via CSV files or manually, all the new feedback pieces will allow the Hub to reevaluate existing Insights, regenerate them, and/or create new ones.

📞 If you have any questions or need assistance - feel free to reach out to our team via chat or email: support@survicate.com.

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