Over at WordPress.com, our main avenue of customer support is live chat. We previously were on Olark, but has since built out a chat system that we call HappyChat (support folks are referred to as Happiness Engineers). There are a number of excellent features that the development team has built in, but an often underutilized one is chat tagging. If a user joins a chat, and asks about a domain renewal, that chat might be tagged with “domains” or “domain-renewal”; we aren’t very strict on tagging, except in certain circumstances. We can pull out the data we need even if the tagging is a little fuzzy.
While I’ve been writing search marketing and SEO articles for our users for a while, I wanted to know exactly what our users were asking in chat, and what kind of things were we spending chat time teaching them about. This is where the chat tagging comes in. Most of the Happiness Engineers are pretty diligent about tagging their chats, so it was pretty easy for me to get an SQL dump of all the transcripts tagged with “seo”…however, it ended up being roughly about 18,000 lines of chat transcripts over the past few months.
Time for some Python magic.
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