Find your customers’ most common questions from Inbox chats

Most stores answer the same ten questions over and over. An export of a few months of Inbox chats shows you which ones, so you can answer them on your product pages and FAQ instead.

1. Export a few months

Use at least 30 days, ideally 90, so one busy week doesn’t skew the picture. How to export.

2. Count conversations by topic

Shopify tags many conversations with a topic such as “Shipping”, “Product details” or “Returns / Delivered orders”.

1. Open conversations.csv in Google Sheets or Excel.
2. Insert a pivot table.
3. Rows: topics. Values: conversation_id, summarised as count. With the default layout each row is one conversation, so this counts conversations. (If you exported one row per message, use count unique instead.)

You now have your topics ranked by number of conversations.

3. Read the customers’ own words

1. Filter topics to your biggest topic.
2. Skim conversation_text. The repeated questions jump out quickly.
3. Want only what customers wrote? Export again with Spreadsheet rows set to one row per message, then filter sender_role to Customer and read message_text.

4. Find what automated replies missed

Filter handled_by to staff to see conversations a person had to answer. On Pro and up you can also untick “Include conversations handled automatically” before exporting, so the file only has chats that reached your team. If the same question keeps reaching your team, add it to your FAQ or Inbox’s instant answers.

5. Search for words that matter

Search the transcript file for words like “out of stock”, “size”, “discount”, “refund” or a product name to see how often each comes up.