Search Improvement: Search for contacts with partial search
in progress
Issac Rosenberger
Business Problem:
- Search on respond.io is currently module-scoped — to find a conversation or contact, users have to already be in the Inbox or Contacts module. There's no way to search or navigate from anywhere else on the platform.
- On top of that, search itself is limited: it's difficult to find contacts using only partial information, such as the last four digits of a phone number.
- Everyday conversation actions (closing, assigning, snoozing, changing lifecycle stage, triggering a shortcut) also require clicking through separate header buttons and popups rather than being reachable from search.
For teams handling high conversation volume daily, switching modules, reaching for the mouse, and re-typing full contact details just to find someone adds up to real lost time.
Desired Outcome:
A universal Command Palette, opened from anywhere with a keyboard shortcut (Cmd+K / Ctrl+K), that lets users:
- Search conversations and contacts by name, custom field, or partial input — without leaving the current page
- Match on partial phone numbers (e.g. last 4 digits)
- Jump directly to any module or page they have access to
- See their recent searches
- Trigger common conversation actions (close, assign, snooze, change lifecycle, run a shortcut, copy contact ID/phone) directly from the keyboard, without the mouse-driven menus
Platform Limitation:
Today there are separate, inconsistent search bars per module (Inbox has three, Contacts has two), none of which support custom field search, cross-module lookup, or partial/accent-insensitive matching. Conversation actions each live behind their own UI surface (dropdowns, popups, header buttons).
Current Workaround:
Currently, users can use the filter option to search for contacts by the last four digits of their phone number. This can be done by filtering the contacts using the "Contact Field Phone Number contains" option with the 4 digits. While this isn't ideal, it provides a temporary solution.
N
Nabilah Binti Salleh
updated the status to
in progress
A
Alyaa See
Merged in a post:
Improve contact search for custom fields like company name
Nick Skibiak
Searching contacts in respond.io feels limited when using fields other than First Name, Last Name, Phone, or Email. In particular, searching by company name is difficult because custom field search appears to require exact matches and doesn’t support the same flexible search behavior as default contact fields.
Why this matters:
• Our team often searches by company name, not just the person’s name
• Exact-match search on custom fields makes it hard to find contacts quickly
• This slows down support and sales workflows in the Inbox and Contacts areas
Suggested improvement:
• Allow partial / contains search for custom fields in contact search
• Make custom fields searchable in the same way as default contact fields
• Ideally support searching by multiple fields at once, including company name
Impact:
This would make contact lookup much faster and reduce friction for teams managing accounts by company rather than only by individual contact name.
A
Alyaa See
Merged in a post:
Contact search should match any field and allow partial matching
Andres Cuberli
- You often need to search by surname or other fields
- Current search feels too exact and slows down contact lookup
- You’d like search to work across any field, even from the first few characters
A
Alyaa See
Merged in a post:
Search Improvement: More Comprehensive First and Last Name Search
A
Antonio Augusto
Business Problem
:Currently, searching by a contact’s first and last name does not return broad enough results, making it harder for users to find the right contact quickly. This creates friction when users search using full names, different name combinations, or variations in how names are stored.
Use Case
:A user wants to search for a contact using their first and last name and expects relevant matches to appear even if the name is entered in a different order, partially, or with slight variations.
Desired Outcome
:Improve contact search so first-and-last-name queries return more comprehensive and relevant results, making it faster and easier for users to locate the correct contact.
Lucas Saldanha
This is of utterly importance
N
Nabilah Binti Salleh
Merged in a post:
Search for contacts should ignore accents (find names with or without accents)
Vithor
Resource Request
Adjust the contact search bar so that the search by name works with or without an accent, allowing you to locate the contact even if the user enters the name without accent.
Current issue
Some contacts have names with accents (e.g., “João”, “Vitória”, “Luísa”) and when searching without accents (e.g., “Joao”, “Vitoria”, “Luisa”), the system returns no results.
Expected behavior
The search must be accentuation-insensitive (ignore accents) and case-insensitive (ignore uppercase/lowercase).
Examples:
“John” meets “John”
“Andre” meets “André”
“Vitoria” meets “Vitória”
Pasting with an accent or without an accent should work equally.
N
Nabilah Binti Salleh
Merged in a post:
Allow searching for contacts by the last 4 digits of the phone/cell phone
Vithor
Resource Request
Implement in the contact search bar the possibility of finding a contact by entering only the last 4 digits of the phone/cell phone number.
Current issue
Today, the search requires the full number (or initial part), which makes it difficult when the user only has access to the end of the number or requires more time.
Expected behavior
When entering 4 numeric digits (e.g. 4827) when searching for contacts, the platform must return contacts whose phone/cell phone ends with those digits.
Work for numbers with or without mask/formats (e.g.: +55 62 9xxxx-4827, 629xxxx4827, etc.).
Acceptance criteria
Searching for the last 4 digits correctly returns matching contacts
Works regardless of the format/mask of the number stored
Does not affect the current name/full phone search (continues to work normally)
Jaime Cardenas Castro
Yes, this is very frustrating because it makes my agents waste time trying to locate a conversation. The same thing happens with WORDS. For example, you want all conversations with the word "complaint" in it. You have to type "complaint" with all its letters, no more, no less, otherwise you don't get any results. But it would be very useful to be able to just type "complain" and that way you get all conversations that have "complain", "complains", "complained", "complaint", "complaints", "complaining", etc and that way it would be much easier to retrieve conversations. This is just an example of how to apply this functionality but there are many more where typing just the beginning of a word or phone number would be very helpful.
Jay Lim
This feature is needed!
Amalia Putrieka
Hi Issac Rosenberger thanks for your feedback!
Currently, you can use the filter option to search for contacts by the last four digits of their phone number. Simply filter the contacts using the "Contact Field Phone Number contains" option with the 4 digits. I understand this isn't ideal, but it could help for now.
Additionally, could you please provide any more details or specific use cases that would further help us improve the search functionality?
Hope to hear from you soon!
S
Spacenter
Amalia Putrieka it's not working also
N
Nabilah Binti Salleh
Spacenter: Hi there, thank you for sharing your comment with us. You can setup via the Advanced Filters - read more here: https://respond.io/help/inbox/inbox-overview#filter-and-sort
If this doesn't help you solve your use case, please reach out to our support team here: https://respond.io/contact
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