Bulk Q&A import

If you've got a spreadsheet of FAQs — from a migration, a survey export, or another support tool — import them in one shot. The button lives inside the Q&A tab on your chatbot's Knowledge page, next to the add form:

  "Add question-answer pairs. Your chatbot will use these as
   high-priority training data..."                [ Import CSV ]

CSV format

Required columns: question, answer. Optional columns: title, variations (pipe-separated | inside the cell).

question,answer,title,variations
"Do you ship internationally?","Yes — we ship to 40+ countries. 7-14 business days.","International shipping","ship abroad|worldwide|overseas"
"What's your return policy?","30 days, no questions asked.","Returns","refund|send back"
"Are you open on Sundays?","Sundays by appointment only.","Sunday hours","weekend"

Rules:

• First row is the header. Column order doesn't matter, names do (lowercase, trimmed).
• Quote any cell containing commas, newlines, or quotes (standard RFC 4180).
• variations is pipe-separated inside a single CSV cell.
• UTF-8 encoding.

Limits

• Max file size: 2 MB
• Max rows: 500 per import

Above either cap, the import stops with an explicit error (see below).

How to import

Click Import CSV on the Q&A tab and pick a file. No confirmation step — it runs immediately.

On success you get a flash:

Imported 497 Q&A. Click Retrain agent to apply.

If some rows were skipped (duplicates or malformed), the count appears too: "Imported 497 Q&A (3 skipped). Click Retrain agent to apply."

Error messages

These are the exact flash messages for each failure mode:

• No file selected: "Select a CSV file to import."
• Too big: "File too large. Max 2MB."
• Missing required column: "CSV is missing required column: {name}"
• Too many rows: "Too many rows ({count}). Maximum 500 per import."
• Malformed CSV: "CSV parse error: {details}"
• Empty file: "CSV is empty."
• Anything else: "Failed to import Q&A CSV."

Fix the flagged issue and re-import. Rows that made it in before the failure point are not rolled back — if you re-run the same file, you'll get duplicates.

Tips

• Dry-run with 10 rows first. Confirm the column names and variations format look right before throwing 500 rows at it.
• Deduplicate before you upload. The import doesn't merge on question text — identical questions become separate rows.
• Keep variations lean. 3-5 per question is enough. Adding more just adds retrieval noise.
• Skip variations on the first pass. Retrieval is already good at paraphrases. Add variations only for questions you see consistently misfiring in real conversations.

After importing

Imported Q&As don't auto-apply to the chatbot — hit Retrain agent to re-embed. See Retraining for the full flow.