What to Look For in a Transcript

Read the failures first

Successful conversations tell you the system works. Failed ones tell you what to fix, and they are a small enough set to read all of them.

Start with conversations that ended without an answer, then those where a person was requested.

Three patterns to spot

1. Rephrasing — the visitor asked the same thing three ways. Your content uses different words from theirs.
2. Abandonment — they stopped mid-conversation. Usually the answer was unhelpful rather than wrong.
3. Escalation — they asked for a person. Note what prompted it.

Rephrasing is the most useful signal and the easiest to miss. It is a visitor telling you, in three different ways, which words your website should be using.

What to record

• The question, in their words
• What the bot said
• What the right answer was
• Which page should have covered it

Four columns. Twenty rows a month is enough to keep improving indefinitely.

Look for the questions you did not expect

Every business has assumptions about what customers care about, and the chat log usually contradicts some of them.

Those surprises are worth more than the confirmations, and they are the reason to read transcripts rather than only metrics.

Turn it into work

The review is only useful if something changes. Pick the top three each month, write or fix the content, recrawl, and confirm.

A review that produces observations without changes stops happening within two months.

Frequently asked questions