Open-text answers hold the "why" behind your scores, but they take real effort to turn into something actionable. A practical approach:
Skim 20-30 responses first to get a feel for the range of answers before trying to categorize everything - patterns emerge faster than you'd expect.
Group similar comments into a small number of themes (aim for 5-8, not 20) - "pricing," "onboarding confusion," "missing feature X." Tag each response with one or more themes as you go.
Cross-reference which themes show up most often among your lowest-scoring responses versus your highest - that's usually where the real signal is, not in the overall theme frequency.
When you present findings, include a few verbatim quotes alongside your theme summary - a single sharp quote often lands with stakeholders more effectively than a percentage.
For a small number of responses, reading them directly from the panel's individual-responses view works fine. For larger volumes, export to CSV and use a spreadsheet or analysis tool to sort, filter, and code responses at scale.