How to identify customer issues in Intercom and Zendesk conversations

The challenge

Chat-based support systems like Intercom and Zendesk make it easier than ever before for users to share feedback. While this is undoubtedly beneficial, it can also lead to significant growth in support conversation volume.

With an increase in support conversations, it becomes harder to identify the issues that inhibit user engagement. Although hiring more support agents may seem like the solution, this only spreads the knowledge of these issues across more people. As that knowledge disperses, answering important questions like “What are our top customer issues?” becomes extremely difficult.

Your support conversations are likely to include a mixture of feature requests from current users, and enquiries from sales and marketing leads. To distinguish between these, you may manually tag conversations to categories them into a related topic group. Once in these groups, you believe it will make it easier to uncover user issues.

However, this is often an unproductive process because of the time taken to tag each conversation manually. Before long, the manual tagging is abandoned, or at the very least done sporadically, and you’re back to square one with no knowledge of your users’ issues.

Luckily, Prodsight can help!

Identify high-level topics

Prodsight automatically analyses your conversations to group user issues and ranks them by the number of mentions and sentiment.

Drill-down into specific sub-topics

The breakdown into the relevant sub-topics ensures that you never have to do any manual tagging again. Sub-topics provide more context to the underlying issue within each parent group. To ensure that the sub-topics are as accurate as possible, Prodsight will rerun the analysis every twenty-four hours.

Verify the impact

Now you can start to dive deeper into the sub-topic with the most mentions and negative sentiment. In this deep dive, you can see whether a feature release has contributed to the number of mentions and sentiment.

Gain deep context into the issue

With the impact verified, you can start to understand and report on why the issue is arising. You can do this by reviewing snippets of the conversations that relate to the issue and similar issues, e.g. “play song” and “play music”.

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If you want to see what insights Prodsight can draw from your support conversations, check out our free seven-day trial.