Improve Your Marketing ROI With These 4 Insights From Live Chat Transcripts

5 min readFeb 11, 2020

Live chat transcripts are the gold mines of customer service. At your fingertips, you have valuable customer insight to make informed business decisions.

We’ve talked about why live chat is an excellent investment and how to turn live chat data into business intelligence.

Now, we’re showing you how to leverage transcripts to align your company with your consumer’s journey. As a result, you’ll expand your digital presence and improve your marketing ROI.

Transcript Insight #1: Knowledge Base

A knowledge base is an expanded FAQ with context about the business’s purpose, culture, support, products, and services. An in-depth knowledge base is a crux to any successful business offering.

Your live chat’s common questions serve as the foundation of your knowledge base service offering. From there, your live chat transcripts will help you keep your knowledge base current and thorough.

Transcripts give your company’s knowledge base a 360-degree view from the customer’s perspective. The theory is if one person has a question, there are 10 to 12 other people with the same problem.

Chats inform you of blind spots and potential gaps to fill in with knowledge, development, or services. In turn, your knowledge base can provide your consumers with the complete picture of your brand — what you do, why you do it, and how you can help them.

The Takeaway: Address merited live chat questions in your knowledge base even if it’s asked only once.

Transcript Insight #2: Customer Needs

Many brands use proactive chat strategies to get inside intel on what products and services to develop for their evolving consumer. Like magic, these developments yield high ROI because this strategy engages and collects data at the source.

For example, one of our clients gets chats every day about their busy phones. The transcripts directed a development — add phones or reduce incoming calls. The company opted for the latter. By addressing common insurance questions on their site, they cut their call volume fast.

The Takeaway: Get the inside scoop from your chat to make business developments.

Transcript Insight #3: Content and SEO For Ads, Landing Pages, and Blogs

Businesses often address pain points with SEO content without an entire picture, working hard to put themselves in customers' heads to figure out what they’re searching for. Creating business-jargon keywords, such as “How do I generate more ROI?” when consumers search simple phrases like, “How to generate leads.’”

Digging into your live chat transcripts solves that problem.

When people are chatting, you have direct access to their exact pain points and how they phrase searches. You can create a message and keywords aligned with their semantics.

Case studies highlighted homeschooling pain points — learning without a traditional environment or curriculum — while targeted ads used specific language and keywords found in the chats. Refining their content and target audience, helped improve ROI on their marketing efforts.

The Takeaway: Pull super specific content from transcripts to resonate with your consumer.

Transcript Insight #4: UX and UI

Live chat transcripts can also inform better UX and UI design for your site and apps.

When people are chatting about:

Difficulty navigating your site.
Difficulty finding information online.
Problems when buying products.
Problems scheduling appointments.
Poor load time or mobile responsiveness.
Bugs or glitches that affect your website.

Then you know you need to re-think or troubleshoot your function and design.

For instance, one of our clients uses an app to control their high-end kitchen product. Without their knowledge, the app was glitching and preventing proper use. Chat transcripts allowed them to take proactive measures to fix the app quickly, something that would otherwise potentially take a lot longer to realize.

The Takeaway: Use chat transcripts to make your website’s UX and UI intuitive and enjoyable.

How To Pull Insights From Your Live Chat Transcripts

Step 1: Download Transcripts

Go into your live chat program and download the transcripts to your computer.

Step 2: Comb Through The Data and Trends

Now it’s time for the leg work. Read through every chat and look for:

Recurring consumer questions: What information do your consumers need?
Consumer language: How are people phrasing questions? Which words do they use often?
Consumer requests: What are your people frequently requesting?
Consumer pain points: What are the barriers to entry to your product or service?

We get it. Step two is tedious.

It requires time, focus, and plenty of notes. Trust us. The effort is worth it!

Step 3: Create a List of Observations

Summarize your data and notes into a concise list of five to ten observations. The shorter, the better. You’ll see the problems you need to tackle with clarity.

Step 4: Find Cost-Effective Solutions

List out all the potential solutions and their cost to your observations. Remember to look at the bigger picture to find solutions that fix many problems. Weigh the cost-benefit and choose a solution that will bring you the most value.

Step 5: Take Action

Step five is the hardest.

Most people want to understand the problem and find a solution, but never take action because the process is overwhelming.

We understand you may have a big problem with a sense of urgency.

Rather than feeling inundated, chunk the solution into realistic pieces over time. You’ll gain more traction when you tackle the issue bit by bit with patience. It’s a slower process, but it avoids doing nothing in analysis paralysis.

When you’re ready, outline the solution’s timeline. Then break it down into small actionable tasks in Basecamp, Todoist, or Asana. Assign tasks to people with deadlines to hold yourself and your team accountable.

Step 6: Keep up the Momentum

Rinse and repeat steps one and two every month to get a micro-focus of your business. You can tackle small, easy-to-fix issues and keep track of recurring trends month-to-month. Then combine your monthly transcript analysis in a quarterly review. At the end of each quarter, follow steps three to five for a macro focus on problems and solutions to improve your ROI.

Start Analyzing Your Live Chat Transcripts ASAP

Look at your transcripts, analyze the trends, then compare them against your current strategy.

More importantly, take action!

Develop knowledge bases and marketing strategies. Test A/B ads, landing pages, and SEO content. Update marketing personas, your brand’s voice, and your website layout.

The opportunities to use live chat to connect deeper with your consumers are endless.

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