How to review Kapa conversations

The kapa platform persists all conversations that your instances are answering across your deployments. Most kapa customers already review these conversations because it helps them improve their documentation and inform product decisions.

The best way to analyze your conversations is Review Mode. In this tutorial we outline how we recommend to use it based on our own experience. This will give you a good starting point for building your own workflow.

What is Review Mode?

Review Mode is the default screen when you open the /Conversations tab in the kapa platform. It shows you only the most interesting conversations your kapa instances have had in the last month. This greatly reduces the amount of conversations you have to review to gain insights and makes the task more manageable if you have a large volume of questions. It also tracks your review progress so you can pick up where you have left off.

How does it filter conversations?

The kapa platform auto labels all of your conversations and Review Mode only shows those that fall into one of the following categories:

Category	Description	Action
Uncertain	Kapa could not find sufficient information in your knowledge sources to answer a question.	Decide whether you want to document this question so it can be answered next time.
Troubleshooting	The user has run into an issue and is trying to debug it with Kapa.	Analyze where your users are getting stuck. Make this part of your product simpler, offer workarounds or document it better.
Unsupported Feature	The user has asked about a feature that is currently not supported.	Evaluate if you want to extend your system.
Competitor	The user is asking a question about your product in conjunction with a competitor.	Analyze what users care about when evaluating your product against competitors. Extend your system or write documentation comparing yourself against competitors.

In our experience these are the conversations that are interesting to both technical writing and product teams. We are constantly looking for new categories that are interesting to you so please reach out with anything you would like to see added. You can select a subset of these categories in the kapa platform if you are not interested in all of them.

The kapa platform also assigns one extra category to your conversations which is filtered out by default.

Category	Description	Action
Off Topic	The user is not asking a serious question about your product.	Simply do not review these, they are filtered out by default.

How does it track my progress?

At the top of the page you can see how many conversations are left to review for the last month. After you have finished reviewing a conversation it will disappear from the view. This lets you pick up again where you have left off. The UI indicates that you are done after all conversations have been reviewed.

How should we use this as a team?

The following approach lets you iteratively work through your most interesting conversations and share the workload required to take action between your team members. You should use this as a starting point for your own workflow.

Step 1: Review conversations on a weekly basis

Make it a practice to go through all conversations shown by Review Mode on a weekly basis. In a team it is common that one or two people are responsible for doing that. Read each conversation and decide if it contains valuable insights that you should act on. You can use the actions described in the table above when doing that.

Often you do not actually want to act on the conversation. For example the user question might be Uncertain but you think it is not worthwhile to document it. In this case simply click on the Mark as reviewed button. This removes the conversation from the screen.

If you find a conversation that you want to act on go to Step 2.

Step 2: Create a ticket to do the work

For this example we assume that you are using Jira as your task management software but of course this will work with other tools.

The reviewer of the conversation should do the following:

1. Create two new status tags: Jira and Fixed. You only have to do this once, not for every conversation.
2. Create a comment for the conversation summarizing your analysis and what action should be taken. i.e. "This is a good question and it is not documented well. We need to update our docs on environment variables".
3. Copy the link to the conversation from the kapa dashboard.
4. Create a ticket with the link in Jira and assign it to the person you would like to execute action.
5. Make sure that the person that you assign the ticket to has access to the kapa platform.
6. Change the status of the conversation to Jira in the kapa platform. This will remove the conversation from the review screen and decrement the counter.

Step 3: Do the actual work

The following steps are for the person who was assigned the created ticket.

1. Open the conversation in the kapa platform from the Jira ticket.
2. Complete the action described in the comment, i.e. update the docs.
3. Set the status tag of the conversation to Fixed.

FAQ

How can I find all conversations with a specific status?

Switch to the All Conversations mode and filter by status tag if you want to see all conversations with a specific status, for example you might want to see all conversations which you are currently tracking in Jira.