Understanding Observations | Chattermill User Guides

Understanding Observations

Precision insights that help you quickly identify exactly what needs to happen to improve your customer experience or to maintain your strengths

Written by Mikhail Dubov
September 30, 2025

What are Observations?

Observations automatically extract precise, quantified insights from customer feedback, identifying specific issues your team can tackle right away.

This transforms how you work with customer feedback. Instead of spending days manually analyzing data to find what needs your immediate attention, Observations automatically surface issues that your team can tackle right away - all with the highest level of accuracy and precision.

How do Observations relate to Themes and feedback?

Observations add a deeper layer of customer intelligence within Chattermill. While Themes capture strategic trends across your customer feedback, Observations go deeper - surfacing the most specific, granular issues within your product.

For example, you might have a Theme which captures positive and negative mentions of product packaging. An Observation could be a specific issue that’s been mentioned in multiple feedback responses, such as: “Product packaging is excessive”. It could also be a specific type of praise, such as: “Product packaging feels premium”. Like feedback responses, Observations can belong to more than one theme.

Each Observation is made up of one or more snippets. Snippets are the parts of feedback responses that are relevant to a particular Observation. They’re highlighted in bold when viewing via the side panel. We use snippets because a single feedback response might contain multiple topics. Each aspect of the feedback might relate to a different Observation. For example, a product review could mention that a product was delivered on time (Praise) but its quality was poor (Issue).

How can I use them?

Observations are integrated across the entire Chattermill platform. You can view the Observations behind any data point, wherever you are in the app, via the side panel. When you open an Observation you can view the name, a short description of what it’s about and the list of snippets associated with it.

View Observations

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Explore Observations with Ask Lyra

One of the easiest ways to explore your Observations is to Ask Lyra. Simply ask questions about your customers and get instant, data-backed answers. Lyra, the Chattermill copilot, uses Observations to answer questions about what customers have said, their opinions, feelings, or general feedback about a product, service, or feature.

Ask Lyra

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For more details, see Ask Lyra

Observations in the Feedback page

In the Feedback page, Observations give you an at-a-glance view of the issues and praise found within all of your feedback responses. Instead of manually looking for trends and similarity in loads of individual customer comments, Observations automatically groups together similar topics for you, saving you time.

Observations in the Feedback page

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Observations in Analytics

You can slice and dice Observations in Reports to conduct deep analysis, and build dynamic dashboards to tell rich stories about your customer journey.

Exploring Observations in Analytics

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For more details, see Using Observations in Analytics

Please note that the amount of historic data processed with Observations depends on your plan. To increase the period of historic data applied to Observations, please speak with your customer success manager.