Theme Maintenance

Over time, themes match less of your feedback. Customers describe the same topics in new words, and start raising topics that didn't exist when your themes were built. Theme Maintenance checks your lens's feedback each month, adds new phrases to your existing themes, and suggests new themes for you to review.

Theme Maintenance is off by default on every lens, and it's only available on lenses (not individual surveys).

The two modes

• Coverage maintenance — finds new phrases customers use for topics your themes already cover, and maps them to those themes. Changes are applied automatically, and the monthly email tells you what changed.
• Theme discovery — finds topics in recent feedback that none of your themes cover, and suggests them as new themes. Nothing changes until you approve them on the review screen linked in the monthly email.

You can turn on either mode, or both.

Turning it on

Open your lens (account menu > Manage lenses, then select the lens) and select Theme Maintenance from the menu on the left. Turn on Coverage maintenance, Theme discovery, or both, enter at least one email address in the Notify field, then click Save.

You can't turn on a mode without at least one email address. The monthly summaries are sent to these addresses.

What happens each month

Each run covers the previous calendar month. The schedule is fixed and can't be changed.

Each run sends one email covering the modes you have turned on. It shows:

• how many existing themes gained phrases, and which gained the most
• how many new themes were found, and the most frequent ones
• a link to review the new themes, if theme discovery is on

If a run makes no changes, no email is sent. If a run fails, the email tells you.

Reviewing new themes

Click the review link in the monthly email. The review screen shows how many themes the run found.

Each suggested theme shows a name, the phrases that would be mapped to it, and a suggested position in your theme structure. You can rename it, remove individual phrases, or change its position using the dropdown — Create base theme, Create subtheme or Merge. Select the themes you want, then click Add selected themes.

Added themes are removed from the list, so you can work through a run over several sessions. The review is complete when the list is empty. Suggestions you don't select need no action — they expire with the run.

What Theme Maintenance changes

• Coverage maintenance adds phrases to your existing themes. Your list of themes stays the same.
• Theme discovery adds only the new themes you approve.

What Theme Maintenance never changes

• Your existing themes. Nothing is renamed, merged, split, moved or deleted.
• Individual surveys. Theme Maintenance only works on lenses.
• The Theme Discovery workflow in Manage Workflows. This is a separate feature and isn't affected.

Things worth knowing

New phrases apply to all your data. Coverage maintenance finds phrases in the previous month's feedback, then applies them to your whole dataset. A phrase found in March also tags matching feedback from earlier periods.

You can keep editing themes. If you have an unapplied draft when a run starts, coverage changes are written to both your draft and your live themes, so applying your draft later keeps them. New themes you approve are added to your open draft, or to a new draft if none is open.

You can undo a coverage run. Each coverage maintenance run creates a restore point in your theme version history. To undo a run, restore the version from before it.

Suggestions can come back. Each run is independent, so a theme you didn't select can be suggested again in a later run. A topic that wasn't relevant one month can become relevant the next. Themes already in your structure are never suggested.

One run won't close every gap on a large lens. How much each run finds depends on your feedback volume.

Each mode's behaviour is fixed. Coverage maintenance always applies changes automatically, and theme discovery always needs your review.

Turning it off

Turn off both modes on the Theme Maintenance page, then click Save. No further runs happen, and changes from earlier runs are kept.

If a run gives you unexpected results, or you'd like Theme Maintenance turned on for several lenses, contact your Thematic account team.