Viewing the conversation transcript

Last updated: April 18, 2026

When a review lands via an AI conversation, the review detail modal shows a Show conversation transcript button below the content. Expanding it surfaces every turn of the chat that produced the review — useful for context on edge-case decisions, like a 2-star review that looks off, or a 5-star review from a chat that went off the rails.

Reviews submitted via the simple review form (non-chat) or imported from a platform don’t have a transcript, so the button doesn’t appear.

What’s in the transcript

Each message shows:

  • Speaker — “BetterReviews” for the assistant, “Customer” for the customer
  • Content — the message text, in chronological order
  • Timestamps — not shown in the UI currently; they’re available through the API (see API reference)

Messages are paginated — up to 100 per load, with a “Showing N of M messages” footer if the conversation ran longer.

Privacy and PII

Customers sometimes type personal information into the chat — especially when routed to the support path (order numbers, emails for follow-up, phone numbers). Two safeguards apply:

  • Email redaction — every message is run through the same redactor the backend uses for logs. Anything that looks like an email address is replaced with [REDACTED_EMAIL] in the transcript you see. The original content stays in the database for GDPR data-request exports, but it never reaches the admin UI verbatim.
  • Admin-only surface — the transcript never appears on the storefront widget, in email notifications, or anywhere a customer can read it. It’s visible only inside your BetterReviews admin.

If a customer requests a GDPR data export, the full unredacted transcript (their side of the conversation) is included in the export — we preserve what was actually said. The admin redaction is an in-product guardrail, not a legal one.

When the transcript is empty

A handful of cases where the transcript shows no messages:

  • Conversation was deleted — if the conversation row was purged via shop-redact or customer-redact, the messages went with it.
  • Legacy reviews — very old reviews predate the messages table; nothing was recorded.
  • Timing edge case — extremely rare, the review was created and the conversation deleted between events.

In all cases the modal tells you what’s going on (“No messages recorded for this conversation”).