Conversations report

Track your new inbound conversations, busiest periods and biggest customer issues, and optimize your support.

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated over a week ago

It’s easy to understand your team’s workload and your customers’ biggest issues with the Conversations report. The report gives you three key insights -

  • How many conversations your team receive, reply to and close.

  • When your team is busiest.

  • The state of your inboxes at a certain time, including how many conversations are open, closed and snoozed.

This report can be grouped and filtered for a deeper view of:

  • The topics your customers are talking about the most.

  • The channels that drive the most conversations for your team — Chat, Email, Mobile apps.

  • The origin of your conversations — Continent & Country.

Start with an overview

You’ll find this report under Reports > Human support > Conversations.

At the top of this report you’ll see an overview of the following metrics for the selected date range:

  • New conversations — The total number of new conversations started.

  • New inbound conversations — The number of new conversations started by an inbound message (not in reply to a message or bot).

  • Conversations replied to — Conversations where a teammate replied (can include conversations started before your chosen dates).

  • Conversations closed — The number of unique conversations closed. If a conversation was closed more than once, it will only be counted as one.

  • Open conversations — The number of conversations with the status ‘Open’, at the end of the time period.

  • Snoozed conversations — The number of conversations with the status ‘Snoozed’, at the end of the time period.

  • Reopened conversations — The number of unique conversations that were reopened. If a conversation was reopened more than once, it will only be counted as one.

  • Replies sent — The total number of replies sent by teammates.

  • Busiest period for new conversations — The hour when the most new conversations were started.

Manage your team’s workload with the New conversations chart

You can track how many new conversations you’re handling over time, so you can identify long-term growth trends. You’ll be able to see if you need to streamline your support process, hire more staff or tackle recurring spikes in volume.

The previous date range is also shown alongside the current one, so you can compare two periods.

It’s important that you can easily compare the same days with each other across weeks. To compare two weeks like-for-like, you need to set the time range to be divisible by 7 days (i.e. 14 days, 84 days, 210 days etc). For example, if you select a period that’s not divisible by 7, such as 12 days, the days of each week won’t line up with each other correctly.

You can gauge your team’s workload for any period up to a year, using the date range filter.

You can also filter your reports by:

  • Tag — Review a subset of conversations with certain tags.

  • Continent — Select a single continent, or more than one.

  • Country — Choose a single country, or more than one.

  • Channel — Filter based on where conversations started. E.g. email, chat, or your mobile app.

  • Started by — See only conversations started by your customers, or those in response to a bot/message.

  • Team assigned — Show conversations currently assigned to a team or teams.

  • Team participated — Show conversations participated in by a member of a team or teams (includes conversations not assigned to the team/s).

  • Teammate — Show conversations where the action was performed by one or more teammate/s (E.g. conversations replied to, or closed by that teammate).

  • Conversation data attributes — Show conversations with specific attributes that you define.

Customize the way charts are grouped

By default this report shows conversations grouped by time period, like the day or week. For a different view, you can choose to group new conversations by continent, country or channel.

To change the grouping, click the ⚙️ Settings icon, then select the grouping you'd like to see, and save your changes.

Note:

  • You can change the grouping on any chart with the ⚙️ Settings icon.

  • Customized grouping is only available on certain Intercom plans.

Understand the rate that conversations are being replied to

The next chart in this report shows the number of conversations started in the chosen period (in blue) alongside the number of conversations where teammates have replied (in green).

The ‘conversations replied to’, may include conversations started before your filtered date range.

The ideal result in this chart is an even number of conversations started and replied to.

If you see fewer conversations replied to than conversations started, your team may be experiencing a backlog of conversations.

More conversations replied to than started, suggests your team are working through a backlog of older conversations, or responding to conversations which have reopened.

Pro tip: Check out the ‘Closed vs. reopened conversations’ chart to confirm if this is the cause.

See which channels your conversations are coming from

Next, you’ll see the chart for ‘New conversations by channel’.

This chart will show you how your new conversations are spread across the channels you support. Channels are the different ways that customers can start a conversation with you:

You can also change the way this chart is grouped, to see how your conversations are spread over time, or by location (continent or country) by using the ⚙️ Settings icon on the top right of the chart.

Gauge your team’s effectiveness at a glance

This chart shows the number of conversions closed vs. the number of conversations which have been reopened. This gives you a quick look at how your team are resolving conversations, and which conversations they are replying to.

Pro tip: For a deeper dive into how effectively your team resolve conversations, use the Effectiveness report.

See the state of unresolved conversations

The ‘Open and snoozed conversations’ chart shows the number of conversations still open, and those that have been snoozed at the end of each day within your chosen dates.

Break down how many replies your team send

For another view of your team’s workload, this chart shows how many replies they’ve sent within the chosen dates.

This is the total number of replies sent in all conversations, not just new conversations.

Tackle the busy periods

It's easy to check which days and times get the most new conversations, so you can make sure you have enough teammates available to manage the busy periods.

The ‘Busiest period for new conversations’ chart breaks down your new conversation volume by day of the week and time of day.


💡Tip

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