Manage contact inquiries

When a visitor submits a contact form on your storefront, the message lands in Inquiries, a shared inbox your team can work from. You can also design the contact forms here.

Open it from Customers → Inquiries in the sidebar.

The inbox

Inquiries uses a two-pane layout: the list on the left, the selected conversation on the right. Opening a New message automatically marks it as Open.

Statuses

Each inquiry also has a priority: Low, Normal, High, or Urgent.

Reply to a customer

1. Select an inquiry from the list.
2. Type in the composer at the bottom and click Send reply, and your message is emailed to the customer. The composer names the address it will use under Replies are emailed to.
3. Or click Send & resolve to reply and mark it resolved in one step.

A reply to a New or Open inquiry moves it to Waiting on customer by itself. A reply to an inquiry in any other status leaves the status as it was.

Switch the composer to Internal note (press Save note) to leave a private message only your teammates can see. An internal note is never emailed to the customer, and it does not change the status or count as your first response. Use Templates for canned replies: Thanks / Acknowledge, Ask for more info, Looking into it and Mark resolved. File attachments are not available yet: the attach button says "Attachments coming soon".

Set status, priority, and assignee

From the conversation header you can change the status, set the priority, and assign the inquiry to a team member so everyone knows who owns it. Mark as resolved, Close inquiry and Reopen are one click each. The Customer panel has a View customer profile link when the sender matches a customer record, and each inquiry has a copyable Inquiry ID.

Search and filter

The list shows Date, From, Subject, Status, Priority and Last activity, with a NEW badge on messages nobody has opened. Search by name, email, or subject, and filter the list by Status, Priority or Form (which contact form it came from) to focus on what matters. The list loads more as you scroll. Use the previous and next arrows in an open inquiry to move through them.

Who gets an email when a message arrives

The store owner gets an email for every new inquiry. The customer gets an automatic confirmation email that their message arrived. Messages sent from the storefront bot when it hands a shopper to your team land here as well, and the bot's settings can add up to five more addresses that get the new-inquiry email.

Delete an inquiry

Open the ⋯ menu (More actions) on the inquiry's row in the list, or in the conversation header, and choose Delete inquiry. This permanently deletes the inquiry and all of its messages, and it cannot be undone: resolving or closing it is the way to keep a record. There is no bin to restore it from. A teammate needs the permission to delete inquiries, which is separate from the permission to reply and to view them, so a teammate who can answer inquiries may still not see a delete option.

Keyboard shortcuts

Build a contact form

The forms your customers fill in are managed from the same place. In Inquiries, open the More actions (⋯) menu and choose Manage forms. You need the permission to manage contact inquiries to build or change forms.

Limits. A store can have up to 20 forms, and a form up to 30 fields.

The forms list

Each form is a row with its name, its key (with a copy button), a Default badge or an Inactive badge, its field count, how many sales channels it is bound to (or All channels), and when it was Updated. Search forms and the channel filter (All channels, Default (unscoped) or one channel) help in a long list. The filter only finds forms: it has nothing to do with which channels may use a form.

+ New form asks for:

A new form starts with the five built-in fields (see below). The row menu has Edit, Copy key, Activate or Deactivate, Duplicate, Set as default and Delete:

• Duplicate copies a form and its fields under a new key and name, with no channel binding, and the copy is not the default.
• Set as default makes it the form used when a storefront asks for a form without naming one. The previous default loses the status.
• Delete permanently deletes the form and its fields. Submitted inquiries are kept. The default form cannot be deleted: make another form the default first.
• Deactivate hides the form from the storefront without deleting it.

The form editor

Click a form to open its editor, which has three tabs: Fields, Settings and Translations. Preview shows how the form will render on your storefront, and Restore defaults re-adds any built-in field that is missing (name, email, phone, subject, message).

Settings tab:

Translations tab: override the name, description, submit button text and success message per language. Add a second language in your store settings first, or the tab says so. Auto translate fills a language in for you.

Fields

Every form starts with the built-in fields Name, Email, Phone, Subject and Message. Email is always shown and always required, and Message is always required, because you need them to reply. A built-in field cannot be deleted: use Hide (Show brings it back). Drag the handle to reorder fields. + Add field opens the field editor.

The field editor has four tabs. General: Label (required, up to 100 characters), Key (how the answer is stored in submissions: lowercase letters, numbers, dashes and underscores, up to 40 characters, unique within the form), Type, Placeholder (up to 200), Help text (up to 500), Default value, Required, Visible, and Layout (Full, Half or Third of the row). The key and type cannot be changed after the field is created. Options: for select fields, each option has a stored value and a label shown to the customer. Validation: Min length and Max length, Min and Max for numbers, a Pattern (regex) with an optional Pattern error message, and a box to test a sample value against the pattern. The pattern is a JavaScript regular expression of up to 256 characters, applied on your storefront and again when the message arrives. Translations: the label, placeholder and help text per language. Options and validation rules are edited on the default language only. A value a customer submits can be at most 10,000 characters.

Bind a form to sales channels

Binding a form to specific sales channels blocks every other channel from seeing it, not just from listing it. If you leave the sales channel list empty, the form is available everywhere. The moment you pick one or more channels, a storefront on any channel you did not pick gets the same "not found" response as a form key that never existed, so a site built against the wrong channel looks broken rather than simply missing your customizations. Double check the channel list before you save if your form suddenly stops receiving messages from one of your storefronts.

Your storefront fetches a form by its key through the SDK. This only works if your site was built to do that. If it was, your fields, button text, success message and translations follow from what you set here, and you never need a code change to edit them again.

If your contact form has its own fields, none of this reaches you

A form somebody coded by hand on your website is not this form. It submits whatever fields were typed into the code, so the fields you set up here never appear to the customer and never arrive with the message. If that hand-written form was never connected to Brainerce at all, the messages go nowhere: the customer sees a thank-you page and your Inquiries list stays empty.

Test it in a minute: open your own website, send yourself a message through the contact form, then refresh this page. If it is not here, the form is not connected, and no setting on this page will change that. Ask whoever built the site to fetch the form from Brainerce by its key and render the fields it returns instead of writing them out by hand. See a feature you turned on is not showing on your website.

More on the inbox side

• Mark as unread (in the More actions menu of an inquiry) puts it back as unread so you come back to it.
• An inquiry's tags, when it has any, show under its header. You cannot add or remove tags from the dashboard.
• The Submitted form data panel on an inquiry shows every field the customer filled in, including your custom ones, with the form it came from and the language it was sent in.

Customers receive an automatic confirmation email when they submit a form, so they know it arrived without you replying immediately.

What's next?

• View and edit a customer profile
• Connect your storefront

Need help with inquiries or forms? Email [email protected].