The number most vendors lead with is deflection rate - the share of conversations that never reached a human. It's the easiest metric to move and the easiest to fool yourself with, because a customer who gave up looks exactly like a customer who was helped. Here's what to watch instead.
Deflection counts what didn't happen. A conversation that ended without a human could mean the customer got a clear answer in twenty seconds - or that they typed the same question three times, gave up, and bought from someone else. Those are opposite outcomes and the metric scores them identically. Worse, it scores the second one as a success while your revenue quietly leaves. Any measure you can improve by making it harder to reach a person is not measuring help.
Automatic tags on finished conversations make most of these answerable by filtering rather than reading.
Record satisfaction, response times and your topic mix before switching the AI on. Teams that skip this end up arguing from memory, and memory is generous about how things used to be.
A rating tells you the score; the comment tells you why. Ten free-text complaints about the bot are worth more than a dashboard trend, because they name the specific failure you can fix.
Once a week, open the lowest-rated AI conversations and read them end to end. Nothing else surfaces the confidently-wrong answer that a metric will happily average away.
Measurement only means something if a bad result can change what you do. If satisfaction drops on AI-handled chats and repeat contacts rise, the honest response is to narrow where the bot runs - or switch it off for that audience and keep the parts that clearly work, like drafts for your agents. A metric nobody would act on isn't a metric, it's reassurance.
Included
Satisfaction ratings with comments, first-response times, filterable history and missed chats - part of the product, not an analytics add-on.
Your data
It's your database, so you can query it directly for anything the dashboard doesn't show.
ZChat gives you the installable server, web dashboard, website widget, and desktop agent tools in one self-hosted product you buy once and keep. Run it on infrastructure you trust and connect AI only if and how you want it.
Deployment
Install on Windows or Linux, behind IIS or Nginx, in a VM, or in Docker if that fits your stack.
Commercial model
One-time purchase, perpetual license, and no monthly per-agent bill attached to growth.
AI Flexibility
Use Ollama locally or connect OpenAI and Anthropic with your own provider accounts.