You know that feeling. It's the 28th of the month, the content calendar is staring at you, and you're trying to conjure up ten ideas from nothing while the kettle boils.
Meanwhile, your customers are emailing you every single day telling you exactly what they want to know.
What they're confused about. What's stopping them from hitting "buy". What they love. What they're worried about. What they wish the product did. And — this is the good bit — the exact words they use to describe all of it.
Your customer support inbox isn't just customer service data. It's content research, and it's sitting right there.
If your helpdesk connects to an AI tool, you can have it read across hundreds of conversations at once and show you the patterns. We use Claude with Richpanel, so that's what we'll walk through — but the same approach works with any helpdesk that connects, and the thinking works even if you're doing it by hand.
Why your inbox is one of your best content sources
Keyword research tells you what strangers type into Google. Your inbox tells you what a real person, who has already found you and is deciding whether to trust you, genuinely needs to know.
That's a completely different quality of information.
Think about the enquiries that land in your inbox every week:
"Will this fit a 40cm mattress?"
"Is this suitable for sensitive skin?"
"What's the difference between X and Y?"
"Can I wear this in summer?"
"Which size should I get?"
Every one of those is a Reel. An FAQ. An email. A product-page improvement. A blog post. A carousel.
And here's the thing we come back to constantly: if one person cared enough to email you, plenty of others wondered the same thing and quietly closed the tab instead.
Stop guessing what your customers need
There's often a gap in a business between marketing and customer service. One side is brainstorming "10 content ideas for September". The other side has answered the same question 47 times since the 1st.
That repetition is a signal. It's free research — and it's so easy to miss when you're the one in there answering.
Once you start looking properly, your inbox can show you:
Common pre-purchase objections
Recurring product questions
Features people misunderstand
Comparison questions between your own products
Unexpected ways customers use your products
Customer language worth putting straight into your copy
Post-purchase education opportunities
Recurring complaints that better content could genuinely prevent
None of that requires a guess. It just requires someone to look across the whole inbox instead of one ticket at a time — which, when you're the one answering the tickets, is almost impossible.
That's exactly where AI earns its keep.
How we use Claude and Richpanel to find the patterns
The setup is simpler than it sounds. You don't need to be technical and you don't need a developer.
Step 1: Connect Claude to your helpdesk
How to connect Claude and Gorgias
Gorgias has its own MCP connector, which means Claude can connect directly to your Gorgias helpdesk.
Open the Claude desktop app.
Go to Customize.
Select Connectors.
Click + Add.
Select Add custom connector.
In the Name field, enter:
GorgiasIn the Remote MCP server URL field, paste:
https://mcp.gorgias.com/mcpClick Add.
Click Connect.
Claude will redirect you to your browser.
Enter your Gorgias subdomain.
For example, if your Gorgias URL is:
yourbrand.gorgias.comyour subdomain is:
yourbrandClick Continue.
Click Allow Access.
Sign in to your Gorgias account if prompted.
Review the access permissions, then click Authorize.
Click Open desktop app to return to Claude.
Start a new Claude chat.
Click the + button in the chat box, then choose Connectors.
Turn on your Gorgias connector for that chat.
You can read their setup guide here: Gorgias MCP guide.
How to connect Claude and Richpanel
Richpanel also has a Claude connection option using a custom connector.
Log in to your Richpanel account.
Go to the Richpanel Claude/MCP setup page and copy your Richpanel connector URL.
Open Claude.
Go to Settings or Customize.
Select Connectors.
Click Add custom connector.
Paste your Richpanel connector URL into the MCP server URL field.
Name the connector:
RichpanelClick Add.
Follow the prompts to authorise or connect your Richpanel account.
Start a new Claude chat.
Click the + button in the chat box.
Choose Connectors.
Turn on your Richpanel connector for that chat.
Step 2: Decide what you actually want to learn
This is the bit most people skip. "Give me content ideas" will give you content ideas — generic ones, that could belong to any brand.
Instead, be specific about the job. Are you looking for pre-purchase objections? Sizing confusion? Reasons people return things? The narrower the question, the more useful the answer.
Step 3: Give it a timeframe
Ask it to analyse the past 30, 60 or 90 days. A timeframe keeps the analysis relevant to your current range, your current pricing and your current shipping situation — and it lets you re-run the same prompt next quarter and compare.
Step 4: Ask for themes before you ask for ideas
Don't let AI leap straight to inventing content. First, get it to tell you what your customers are actually talking about and how often. Then, once you can see the real patterns with your own eyes, ask for the ideas.
Themes first, ideas second. Every time.
The prompts we'd actually use
Save these. Swap in your own products and timeframes.
Find the themes
Analyse our customer support conversations from the past 60 days. Identify the 10 most common questions customers ask before purchasing. For each one, tell me approximately how frequently the topic appears, the language customers commonly use when asking about it, and what this suggests they need help understanding.
Content opportunities
Based only on themes you can identify in our customer conversations, give me 20 content ideas that answer genuine customer questions.
Objections
Identify the most common objections or concerns customers raise before purchasing. Turn these into educational Instagram Reel ideas.
FAQs
Identify questions that repeatedly require our customer service team to explain the same thing. Recommend FAQs or website content we could create to answer these proactively.
Email marketing
Find recurring customer questions that would make useful educational email topics. Give me the customer problem, key message and suggested email angle.
Customer language
Identify words and phrases customers repeatedly use when describing their problem, desired outcome or our products. Highlight language that could be useful in marketing copy.
That last one is our favourite. Customers almost never describe your product the way your brand guidelines do, and their version is usually the one that converts.
Want these as a one-pager you can keep? Grab the prompt pack here — no need to scroll back to this post every time.
One inbox question, five pieces of content
Here's how it works in practice.
A customer emails and asks: "What's the difference between your bamboo sheets and your pet-friendly sheets?"
One question. Now look at what it becomes:
Instagram Reel — "Bamboo vs pet-friendly: which one's for you?"
Carousel or comparison graphic — side by side, feature by feature
FAQ — added to your site so the next person finds it in ten seconds
Educational email — sent to everyone who's browsed one but bought neither
Product-page comparison section — right where the hesitation happens
You're not creating content to fill a calendar. You're answering something people have genuinely asked. It's a much nicer way to work, and the content performs better because it's doing a job.
The bonus: it changes what's in your inbox
We want to be careful here, because "content reduces your support workload" isn't quite right. Your inbox doesn't shrink. What changes is what's in it.
When you spot a repeated question and answer it properly before someone has to ask, the "which size?" and "is this in stock?" emails thin out — and what's left is the good stuff. The customer who needs a genuine problem solved. The one you can turn around with a magical moment. The one who becomes a repeat buyer because of how you handled something.
That's a much better inbox to have. You also get:
Easier purchasing decisions, because the hesitation is handled up front
Better product pages
A library of resources your support team can send in one click
Trust built before someone has spent a cent
Customer service feeds marketing. Marketing improves education. Better education changes the shape of the inbox. It's one of the few things in a small business that genuinely compounds.
This is also why we don't think of customer service as a separate box off to the side. When we're in a brand's inbox — and on Premium, that's twice a day, plus replying to reviews weekly and keeping an eye on Instagram and Facebook comments daily — we're not just clearing tickets. We're the ones who notice that eleven people asked about sizing this month, and that it's always the same two products. We flag those patterns to the founder as they come up.
Don't hand your whole content strategy to AI
We'll say this plainly, because there's enough "AI will write all your content!" noise out there already.
Claude isn't replacing your brand voice or your marketing strategy here. It's mining the information.
The gold is the actual customer conversation — it always was. What AI changes is that you can now read across hundreds or thousands of those conversations and see the shape of them, which is almost impossible when you're answering tickets one at a time with 40 more waiting.
You still decide what's worth making. You still write it in your voice. You're just no longer guessing what to make it about.
Your inbox shouldn't sit in a silo
It's one of the closest places you can get to your customer — their questions, their frustrations, their objections, and the exact words they use to describe what they need.
At Kirsty & Co we're obviously big believers in great customer support. But the really clever bit is taking everything you learn in those conversations and feeding it back into the rest of the business.
Because sometimes your next great piece of content isn't sitting in a brainstorming doc.
It's sitting in your inbox.
If reading this made you think "lovely idea, but I can barely keep up with the inbox as it is" — that's the exact problem we solve. We're an onshore team of Australian VAs who look after customer service for product-based brands, from $700+GST a month. Have a chat with us and we'll tell you honestly whether we're a fit.
