Transcripts and what visitors asked

The questions people ask are usually worth more than the answers they get. They are your site's missing pages, in their own words.

By email, when a chat ends

Set an address on the site and each finished conversation is sent there: the exchange, and a short summary of what the person wanted and whether they got it. A conversation ends when the visitor chooses End chat or after fifteen minutes without a message.

One address per bot, so a bot you run for a client can send its transcripts directly to the client. Check the address carefully before saving it; transcript delivery addresses are not verified.

How long they are kept

Conversations and captured leads are removed by the hosted service's periodic retention sweep. Retention is currently an instance-wide setting rather than a different period for each plan.

Deleting a bot invalidates its key immediately, so the widget stops working. It does not immediately erase stored conversations or captured leads; those remain until the retention sweep.

What is in them

What was typed, on both sides. The visitor's page address is available to the bot while answering but is not stored as a transcript field. Chat does not require an account, email address or name, so visitors remain anonymous unless they type identifying information. If you enable the separate contact form, submitted details are handled as a lead.

Which is worth remembering when you read them: people do sometimes type a phone number into a chat box. Treat the transcripts as you would any other customer correspondence.

Using them

Read the first thirty. Every answer that came out badly is either a fact missing from Context or a Guardrail you had not thought to write down, and fixing it often takes one sentence. That loop is most of the work of running one of these well, and it settles down quickly.