How to Properly Tag Chat Conversations — And Why It’s Essential

Customer chats are filled with insights into what your customers want and the problems they might be having. But if your agents aren’t tagging these conversations for analysis and action, you aren’t getting the full value out of your chat software.

What is Conversation Tagging?

Tagging is the process of assigning meaningful labels to your customer chat conversations. By meaningful labels, I mean labels that specifically describe what the chat conversation is about — in essence, a brief one- or two-word summary. These labels, otherwise known as tags, act as a reminder so that you can later remember the contents of the conversation at a glance.

How to Properly Tag Chat Conversations — And Why It’s Essential conversation tagging

Tags also work as a tool for grouping multiple related conversations together, so that all the conversations about a specific topic are retrieved during a search. This way you see all relevant conversations together in one place.

The Benefits of Tagging

1. Find Conversations More Easily

I personally think it’s a huge waste of your valuable time to re-read hundreds of conversations until you find the ones that you are looking for. It’s much more effective to narrow your search to the exact conversations you need, right from the start.

Tagging allows you to efficiently sort through your conversations and pull up only the ones related to a particular issue.

2. Drive Change in Your Product or Process with Tag Analytics

You can also use conversation tags to learn about your customers — their needs, requests, pain points, and what they like or dislike about your product.

You can use your conversation tags not only to identify opportunities for improving your product or service but also to find those pesky product issues that frequently annoy your users and, by extension, your support team.

3. Decrease Support Costs

Let’s say your company is facing a surge in new customers or users and you can’t seem to hire support staff quickly enough or it isn’t financially feasible to expand your support team. You can analyze your customer chat conversation tags and identify recurring support issues.

By either fixing these issues in the product or providing better customer education, fewer new customers will reach out to the support team with the same set of questions.

The result — lower support costs and a sane support team where the monotony of dealing with the same queries again and again is vanquished once and for all.

Conversation Tagging in Practice

Establishing a Tagging Framework

The first step in your tagging journey is to establish a tagging framework — a consistent set of tags that summarize the contents of a customer’s conversation in a few words and can be easily understood by the members of your team.

Broad vs Specific Tags

There is some debate about how specific chat tags should be.

Broad tags make it easier to categorize conversations if you’re dealing with a smaller tagging framework. However, the downside is that you’re losing valuable context and detail. You’ll get a vague sense of the conversation topic but have to re-read the entire conversation to figure out the specifics.

Essentially, you are trading off ease of use and specificity.

Recommended Tag Structure

I recommend tags that are assembled from two or three individual components, starting from an overarching category level and becoming more precise with each added component.

An example of a strong tag, following this structure: “Feature Request — Photos — Filters”.

Now let’s look at each component in more detail.

Product Area

The second component of your tag introduces another layer of detail about the conversation — specifying the product area (feature, product, or service) mentioned in the conversation.

For example, if your product is a photo-sharing app, your product areas could include:

Photos
Sharing
Albums
Filters
User Profile

Issue

The third component goes into further detail about the conversation’s contents — specifying the particular issue that was discussed in the conversation.

For example, if your user ran into an issue with photo uploading, you might choose to name it “Intermittent Uploading.”

Or if a user inquired about changing their name, you might call the issue “Name Changing.”

The Combined Tag

When you join the three components together, you get meaningful conversation tags such as:

Bug — Photos — Intermittent Uploading
User Education — User Profile — Name Changing
Finance — Billing — Invoice Request
Finance — Pricing — Too Expensive
Usability Issue — Photos — Uploading
Usability Issue — Albums — Deleting

Applying Your Tagging Framework

Now that you know the theory behind setting up a tagging framework, it’s time to apply it in practice.

Step 1: Generate Tags

A good way to come up with your initial tag set is to have a brainstorming session with members of your support, product, marketing, and sales teams.

The goal is to agree on the language you are going to use for each component, as these are the basic building blocks for your tags.

Generally, a good place to start is by defining the broad categories that are in line with your business processes.

Then list all the product areas that concern your customers.

Finally, try to recall common issues that customers inquired or complained about recently and write them down. Reading through a few chat conversations will help jog your memory.

Step 2: Revise Your Existing Chat Tags

If you’ve already done some tagging before reading this post, you may want to consider revising your existing tags. Otherwise, skip to Step 3.

If you want to follow our tag framework when creating new tags, you’ll likely need to adjust your old tags to maintain consistency. It’s also a good idea to delete any duplicate or redundant tags that you may find in the process.

Step 3: Create New Chat Tags

Depending on the chat software you use, how you create new tags will vary.

In Intercom, for example, you would start by going to the Conversation view. Most other software will have a similar view you can access. Go through a batch of closed customer conversations and create tags using our recommended three-part structure as you go.

When in an open Intercom conversation, hover over a relevant message and click on the tag icon.

Then type in the relevant tag name in the search bar and click “Create new tag”. Confirm selection with “Save”.

Your tag will appear under the message.

Repeat this process until you have covered a wide range of conversations with various tags.

Step 4: Document Your Tags

One thing to keep in mind when creating tags is consistency. All tags must be created by following a set process that includes a similar structure and precise terminology. Tagging consistency reduces bloat and makes understanding tags easy.

You don’t want to end up in a situation where each team member creates their own version of a tag, describing common issues, and therefore produces duplicate tags. That will make it very difficult to draw any insights from your tagging effort.

A powerful tool for encouraging tagging consistency is to create a shared document to record your tags, particularly the most frequently used ones. Each tag should have a brief explanation of its meaning.

This shared document keeps all team members that are involved in the tagging process on the same page. It also equips you with a database of tags that makes it easy to train new staff.

Step 5: Train Your Team

Once you implement a tagging framework, the most difficult part of self-tagging is getting into the habit of tagging every single conversation.

First, your support team needs to understand the value of tagging so they are motivated to do it. You need to explain why tagging matters and the benefits of tagging and ensure your team is on board with the process.

Secondly, you will want to introduce your support team to the process of tagging and your “source of truth” tag document. Take your time to walk them through the main tags and the situations in which they should be used.

Finally, your team members should be confident in creating their own tags when new unique situations occur. Explain how the tags are structured so your team can create new tags without creating duplicates.

Take The Headaches Out of Tagging

Setting up a concrete process for tagging is essential when you’re tagging manually. Another option is automatic tagging with a solution like Playvox Customer AI. It automatically pulls insights from every ticket, survey, and digital interaction your agents are involved in, taking all the work out of tagging. You can keep mining conversations for insights as your company scales without wasting time or adding new agents. Because you’ll more easily understand issues your customers are having, you’ll be able to improve your product and reduce contact volume.

Ready to see what Customer AI can do for your conversation tagging — and your agents’ sanity? Ask for a demo!

How to Properly Tag Chat Conversations — And Why It’s Essential

What is Conversation Tagging?