Categories and sub-categories decide where a piece of feedback is filed and who picks it up. They are yours to create, rename and retire.
Categories and sub-categories
Each category carries an owner and a priority. Together they are the routing spine: when a piece of feedback is sorted, the category decides whose desk it lands on.
Topics
Topics are for reporting rather than routing. You build a topic from keywords, and each topic belongs to exactly one category, so anything you can report on also has somewhere to be sent.
How to set them up
1. Open Consumer Insights, then Categories and topics.
2. Add a category, give it a name, an owner and a priority.
3. Add sub-categories underneath it for the finer distinctions your team actually makes.
4. Add topics and map each one to a category.
What changes when you edit them
The list is shared across the product. A category you add here turns up in the Overview routing lines, the social topic rankings, the Ratings by category breakdown, and the mentions feed.
Changes take a few minutes to work through the dashboards. The panel tells you whether it is up to date and when it last refreshed, so you are not left guessing whether an edit has landed.
Frequently Asked Questions
If I change an owner, what happens to work already assigned?
New feedback goes to the new owner. Anything already assigned stays where it is.
Can a topic belong to two categories?
No. Each topic maps to exactly one category, so every reporting view has a single routing home.
What happens to feedback in a category I retire?
Existing feedback keeps its history. New feedback stops being filed there.