A dashboard nobody opens is not reporting
Every chat product has a dashboard, and every chat product has customers who have not opened it since setup week. That is not laziness. A dashboard is a place you have to remember to go, and support leads have a great deal else to remember.
Scheduled email is the cheapest fix for that. It reverses the direction: instead of you going to look, the summary arrives whether or not you were thinking about chat that week. For most small teams a digest that lands on a Monday is the difference between noticing a bad trend in week two and noticing it in month two.
MyLiveChat offers this in two quite different forms, and it is worth being clear which one you actually want, because teams routinely switch on the wrong one and then wonder why their inbox is full.
The two things Email Report Settings can send
Scheduled digests are periodic summaries of how chat is going. There is a weekly cadence and a monthly cadence, and they are independent switches, so you can run one, both, or neither. These are the reporting instrument.
Transcript forwarding is a different animal. When it is on, the transcript of each completed chat is emailed out as it finishes. It is not reporting at all, it is a feed. On a site with a handful of chats a week it is a useful record; on a busy site it is hundreds of emails nobody will read, and it will bury the digests you actually wanted.
The distinction that matters when choosing: a digest answers how are we doing, and a transcript feed answers what exactly was said in that one conversation. If you find yourself wanting the second regularly, the searchable archive in transcripts is a better tool than your inbox, because you can find a conversation instead of scrolling for it.
Where each one is delivered
This trips people up, because the two features address mail differently and only one of them is configurable.
- Weekly and monthly digests go to the email address on the account. There is no separate recipient list for them. If you want them somewhere else, you change the account email or forward from the mailbox they land in.
- Transcript forwarding takes its own list of addresses, entered as a comma-separated list, so you can send transcripts to a shared support mailbox or to more than one person.
The practical consequence for a growing team: digests are tied to whoever owns the account. When the person who set up chat moves on, the reporting follows their address unless somebody updates it. That is worth putting on your offboarding checklist, because the failure is silent. Nothing errors. The reports simply go to a mailbox nobody opens.
If several people need the digest, the durable answer is to point the account email at a shared mailbox or a distribution list rather than an individual.
Why the emails stopped arriving
When scheduled mail goes quiet, the cause is nearly always one of a short list. Work through it in this order.
- Check the plan. Both scheduled digests and transcript forwarding are paid-plan features. On a free or lapsed account they do not send, and there is no error to notice.
- Check the recipient list is not empty. Transcript forwarding needs both the switch on and at least one address. A switch on with an empty list sends nothing, quietly, and looks configured.
- Check spam and filters. Automated mail with the same subject every week is exactly what an over-eager rule learns to file away. Search the mailbox rather than trusting your eye on the inbox.
- Check the account email is still real. The most common cause of all, and the one people check last.
Diagnose against the dashboard rather than against memory. If the numbers are there when you look, the reporting is working and you have a delivery problem, which is a different fix from a configuration problem.
What a digest is good for, and what it is not
An automated summary is a smoke alarm. It is excellent at telling you something changed and poor at telling you why, and treating it as more than that is how teams end up making decisions on a chart with no context.
Use it to notice. Volume up by half, response times drifting, a quiet week that should have been busy: these are worth a look, and the digest surfaces them without anybody remembering to check.
Do not forward it upward as your reporting. A leadership report needs the thing the numbers cannot carry, which is what happened and what you are doing about it, and that argument belongs to a person rather than to an automated mail. We make the case in full in reporting live chat results to leadership. The digest is your prompt to write that report, not a replacement for it.
One habit makes the digest genuinely useful: read it against what you expected before you opened it. A number you predicted correctly teaches you nothing. A number that surprises you is the whole value of the email.
How MyLiveChat fits
Email Report Settings sits in the dashboard with the rest of the reporting configuration, and the same figures are available on screen in analytics whenever you want to go deeper than a summary allows.
A setup that works for most teams: monthly digest on, weekly digest on only while you are actively changing something, transcript forwarding off unless your volume is genuinely low or you have a compliance reason to keep a mail copy. That gives you a regular pulse without training yourself to delete our mail unread, which is the real failure mode of automated reporting.
If your reason for turning on transcript forwarding is record keeping, check your retention policy first. Emailing every conversation to a mailbox creates a second copy of customer data in a place your deletion process probably does not reach.
What to measure
The reporting itself is worth a check twice a year. Three questions cover it.
- Does anybody read it? Ask directly. An unread digest is not a harmless default, it is a signal you are watching a service nobody is accountable for.
- Did it catch the last problem? If your last bad month was noticed by a customer complaint rather than by the digest, either the cadence is too slow or you are measuring the wrong things.
- Is the recipient still the right person? Reporting outlives roles, and the account email is the part of your setup most likely to be stale.
If all three answers are good, leave it alone. Reporting configuration is not something that benefits from tinkering, and the main risk to it is not being wrong but being forgotten.