Running an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey gets you a score that's easy to track and chart over time, but the free-text comments that come with it often go unused. The way to actually use NPS comments is to stop treating them as a footnote to the score, and instead log each one into your feedback tracking system and categorize it.
Why free-text comments tend to get buried
Scores are numbers, so averaging them and tracking trends is easy. Comments are text, and in most survey tools they end up filed as "reference material" rather than something to act on. As response volume grows, nobody has time to read every comment, and the score becomes the thing people actually look at while the comments get skimmed at best. But the specific reason a score dropped, and the clue for what to improve next, usually lives inside those comments.
The score alone doesn't tell you "why"
A "7 out of 10" can mean completely different things depending on who wrote it. "I'm happy with the features but the price gives me pause" and "I just started using this, too early to say" are both 7s, but call for entirely different actions. We covered a related limitation in "Counting Feature Requests Won't Tell You What to Build Next", and NPS has the same underlying problem: the number summarizes the situation but doesn't explain the reason behind it.
Log comments into your feedback tracking system
The practical move is to copy each comment, as written, into your feedback tracking system. Avoid summarizing or paraphrasing; keep the respondent's own words intact. Losing the nuance makes it hard to tell what they actually meant when you come back to it later. Once logged, keeping these comments in the same place as feedback from other channels, support, sales, social media, makes duplicate themes and patterns easier to spot. See "How to Bring Customer Feedback Scattered Across Support, Sales, and Social Media Into One Place" for more on consolidating across channels.
Read detractor comments first
If logging every comment is too much, start with the low scores (detractors). Those responses tend to be dense with specific complaints and churn-risk signals, making them the highest-value reading. High scores aren't just praise either, they often explain what stood in the way of a perfect score, which is useful for finding your next improvement.
Wrapping up
Using NPS free-text comments well means treating them separately from the score, logging each one into your feedback tracking system, and keeping it alongside feedback from other channels. Capturing the "why" behind a score gives you the information the number alone can't. To see what tracking and categorizing feedback actually looks like, check out the demo board.