An Answer-Source Line for Website Chat Transcripts: Mark Whether a Reply Was Written, Suggested or Looked Up
When a small team answers website chat, replies come from different places. Someone types a fresh answer. Someone pastes a saved reply. Someone accepts a drafted suggestion. Someone checks a price list and quotes it. When a customer later says "you told me X," the team needs to know which of those happened. This article proposes a one-line label on each stored reply. It is a suggested internal practice, not a feature of any particular chat product.
Inputs you need
Decide on four labels: written, saved, suggested and checked. Written means a person composed it for this customer. Saved means taken from a reusable reply without change. Suggested means a drafted proposal that a person accepted, with or without edits. Checked means a person confirmed a fact against a named internal document before sending. Add a free field for the name of that document when the label is checked.
Branching decisions
When a person sends a saved reply, ask whether anything in it depends on the customer's situation, such as dates, quantities or availability. If yes, the reply should be relabelled as written after the person adjusts it, or marked checked if they confirmed the details. If nothing depends on the situation, saved is correct.
When a person accepts a suggested draft, require a quick read for any factual claim. If the draft contains a factual claim that the person did not verify, the label stays suggested, and the team treats it as unverified for later review. If they verified it, switch to checked and name the document.
When a reply contains no factual claim, such as a greeting or a request for a phone number, the label matters less; use written or saved and move on.
A hypothetical worked example
Imagine a small tutoring centre. A parent asks whether a Saturday group has space. A team member pastes a saved reply that says spaces are usually available on Saturdays. The label is saved. Later the parent complains that the group was full. In the transcript the team sees saved with no checked label, so they can tell the claim was never confirmed for that date. They adjust the saved reply to say that availability must be confirmed, and they add a rule that any reply naming a date must be labelled checked with the timetable named.
Stop conditions
Stop using a saved reply if two transcripts show it contributed to a misunderstanding; retire or rewrite it. Stop accepting suggested drafts for topics where nobody on the team can verify the claim quickly, such as anything the team has no document for. In those cases, reply that someone will confirm and follow up.
Small acceptance checks
Take ten invented transcripts, mixing all four sources. Ask a colleague who did not write them to read each and say, from the labels alone, which replies were verified. They should be able to do this without asking questions. Confirm that every checked label names a document. Confirm that no saved reply contains a date, price or quantity. Confirm that relabelling is possible after the fact if a person realises they mislabelled something.
What this does not do
Labels do not make answers correct. They only make the origin visible. Treat them as a way to find the cause of a problem faster, and keep a human responsible for every reply that goes to a customer.