Your customer support team will deal with a range of message types - from bugs, to product feedback, to complaints, to feature requests. A good support team not only resolves each customer problem, but they’ll go one step further and tag each message. Over time, you’ll then gather a great store of valuable information about everything your customers are telling you - and it will all be easily searchable later.
Your engineers will want to hear about the impact of their bugs, for example, and your product team will want to know exactly where your customers are getting lost and confused. By tagging your messages and sharing your findings, you can make sure the right feedback is available to the right people in your company.
How to tag a conversation
To tag a conversation, simply go to the relevant message in that conversation and hover over the tag icon:
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Apply tags in the Intercom conversations app on iOS & Android
To tag conversations on the go, follow these steps:
iOS
Long tap (hold your finger) on a conversation part.
Select "Tag this reply".
Search and choose from your existing tags, or tap "Create new tag..."
Type the name of your new tag.
Tap "Save".
Tap "Done"
To remove a tag, tap the "X" on the tag and select "Remove".
Android
Long tap (hold your finger) on a conversation part.
Select "Tag this reply".
Search and choose from your existing tags, or tap "Create new tag..."
Type the name of your new tag.
Tap "Enter" on your keyboard.
Tap "Done"
To remove a tag, tap the "X" on the tag and select "Remove".
Identify topics and trends in your feedback
When you and your team are consistently tagging over time, you'll amass valuable data that can inform how your product evolves. Tagging conversations with general tags like "Bug" or "Feature Request" lets you search for these things later and see all conversations about that topic.
But you should also be more specific and use tags to track conversations about a particular bug or feature like "A/B Testing Bug" or "Events Feedback". Over time, you'll start to see which requests are most common, or which bugs impact the most users. This kind of information will help your team prioritize bug fixes and decide what new features to build next.
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Important messages to tag
Below, we share just a few ways we categorize and tag our feedback at Intercom:
The Bug Report tag
Even the best product teams ship bugs. When your users spot those bugs and report them, you need to let the relevant people know. To relay this to your team clearly and efficiently, tag it as ‘bug’ and leave a comment if necessary. Be sure to thank your customer for taking the time to report the issue, and if you really want to delight them, follow up and let them know when it’s fixed.
The Confused tag
You and your team know your product better than anyone, right? But new users coming to it with fresh eyes and zero context are going to have a different perspective on it. That’s why customers will often ask what a feature means or how to use it. Those conversations generally begin something like this: “What does X mean?”, “I don’t understand why…” or “It doesn’t make sense to me that…”. This kind of feedback often shines a light on the product team’s blindspots and can help you improve your features.
The Unaware tag
Your customers will request or ask about features that already exist in your product. These conversations highlight areas where you need to better communicate what your product can do. If you have an excellent events calendar in your product, but customers keep asking if it’s possible to record events, then you don’t have a product problem - you have an awareness problem. As well as your product team, your marketing or product education teams might want to know about this awareness issue. Tag it for them all.
The Feature Request tag
Customers will often want your product to do more than it currently does. Take advantage of the fact that they are telling you exactly what they want. It’s important to let them know the product team will see their request, and to try and understand why they’re asking for that feature.
Pro Tip: Each quarter our research team generates a Customer Voice Report where they list the top 10 feature requests from our customers. This helps inform our product roadmap for the following quarter. Once you’ve been tagging your messages for long enough, creating this report is made far easier.
The Churn Feedback tag
By tagging any feedback from churning customers you’ll be able to prevent it from happening later by taking action earlier in the cycle. If a customer is leaving because her own business is failing, that’s one thing. But if several customers are cancelling because of the recent feature “improvements” you made, then you’ve got an opportunity to directly address future churn. For example, you could send these folk a message asking what specifically they didn’t like about the feature and use this feedback to improve it.
The Outage/Degradation tag
If your site or app is down or unavailable you want to know how wide the impact on your customer base has been. Tagging these communications gives our infrastructure team a sense of how performance issues are impacting customers.
The Positive Feedback tag
This should be relatively easy and obvious to spot, but tag it so the relevant team or teams get the feedback. For example, it’s useful for a designer to know that the feature they’ve built is doing well and that customers are getting value from it. It’s also useful to have positive customer quotes that can be used in marketing materials. Just as important, remember to thank the user for sending it in.
Keep your tags up to date as your needs change
Read how to edit, archive or delete tags in this article.
Report on conversation trends
Now that you’re tagging your conversations, you can get an overview of any trends with the Conversation tags report. You’ll gain insight into where your customers are confused, the features they request the most, how they’re impacted by bugs or outages, and much more. The report can also be exported so it’s easy to share.
Next, you can get insights on how your team is performing in the team inbox.