How Do I See What Customers Ask Most in Chat?
Use a chat tool that groups conversations by topic for you, across every channel, and lets you send them where your team works. AeroChat’s dashboard shows your most frequent topics, the topics most often handed to your team, and which channels customers use, for any date range. You can tag conversations, search them by keyword, and send conversation events by webhook to a Google Sheet or other tool. Alerts for hand-overs and assignments go to the staff who need them.
Why it happens
Merchants on the Shopify Community want to learn from their chats. One wants a year of conversations in a file to find the most common questions and write a better FAQ. Another asked for chats to be open to export and AI analysis. A third wanted to label conversations through an API and found the messages aren’t available there. Store owners also can’t find where to choose which staff get chat notifications.
The questions customers ask are the clearest signal of what your product pages, policies and emails fail to explain. When that history is locked in a tool, the same questions keep coming. We cover exporting Shopify Inbox history on its own page: Can I export Shopify Inbox conversations?
The usual fixes and their limits
- Read through chats and keep a tally. Works for a few dozen conversations. Not for months of them across several channels.
- Ask your team what comes up. Quick and useful. Memory favors the last annoying chat over the most common one.
- A helpdesk with reports, such as Zendesk or Freshdesk. Strong reporting on tickets. Topics depend on how consistently agents tag them.
- Notifications for everyone. No message is missed, and everyone learns to ignore the alerts.
How to handle it with AeroChat
Every conversation from web chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram, email, TikTok Shop buyer chat, Shopee and Lazada sits in one AeroChat inbox. AeroChat reads the intent of each message, so the dashboard can rank your top topics and your escalated topics, the ones it handed to your team. That second list shows where to add knowledge or a workflow next. You can add your own tags, search every conversation by keyword, and pick any date range. To route work, assign conversations to staff, who get notified of new messages, assignments and hand-overs. To keep a record outside AeroChat, send conversation events by webhook, or use Zapier triggers filtered by intent, for example only returns or complaints.
Customer: Do you ship to Canada, and how long does it take? (example)
AeroChat: Yes, we ship to Canada. Delivery takes 6 to 9 business days, and shipping is US$15 (example).
In AeroChat: the conversation counts under the “shipping” topic. At the end of the month, shipping is the top topic, so the store adds an international shipping table to its product pages.
Another customer: “I want to complain about a damaged parcel.” In Slack, through a Zapier trigger filtered to complaints: a message to the customer care lead with a link to the conversation.
Copy this into AeroChat
Tag every conversation with one topic: “order status”, “shipping”, “returns”, “sizing”, “product question”, “complaint” or “other” (example).
- If a conversation is a complaint, assign it to our customer care lead and send it to our Zapier webhook for complaints (example).
- If a customer asks about a wholesale order, assign it to our sales lead.
- When a conversation closes, send the date, channel, topic and whether you or our team resolved it to our Google Sheet through our webhook (example).
Never send the customer’s email, phone number or address to the sheet. Reply in the customer’s language.
Use your own topics and webhook URLs before you paste it.
What to connect
- Your Shopify store. Built in. Install AeroChat from the Shopify App Store and connect your store, so the questions are answered from your products, pages and orders.
- Your channels. Every channel you connect adds to the same topic counts.
- A webhook destination, if you want your own copy. Zapier, Make or n8n can pass events to a Google Sheet, Slack or your helpdesk.
Questions
Do I have to tag every conversation by hand?
No. The dashboard’s topics come from the intent AeroChat detects in each conversation. Your own tags are optional, for the categories you care about.
Can I see which questions the AI couldn’t answer?
Yes. The escalated topics list shows which topics most often went to your team. See also the glossary entry on intent detection.
Can I control who gets notified?
Yes. Assign conversations to staff, and they get the alerts for those conversations. The recipe above shows how to assign by topic.
Which plan includes the dashboard insights?
Insights come with the Growth plan and above. See pricing.
Can I export contacts too?
Yes. Contacts export to CSV, Excel or PDF. See what businesses can learn from conversation data.
Using a different system? If it has a public API, it connects to AeroChat the same way: describe what you want, paste in its key, and it runs.
Can’t find your tool? Message us in the chat on this page and we’ll tell you how it connects.
See what your customers ask most
Install AeroChat, connect your channels, and check the top topics on your dashboard after the first week.
7-day free trial.