Make your chat agents' work easier and more efficient with canned responses

If your customer support receives a lot of repetitive questions from clients, you can make your chat agents' work much more efficient if you create predefined answers based on those common questions and train the agents to use them appropriately.

Canned responses feature saves your time and resources for dealing with generic types of questions, which basically make up for 80% or more of all the questions addressed to the customer service.

Provide Support's canned responses can be added to the account only by the account admin. Once added in the Control Panel, they become available to be used by the chat agents in their apps.

There is a whole bunch of operations you can perform with your predefined answers in order to set them up in a way which will work for your company. Let us describe it in detail.

Add new predefined message

Obviously, you can start with adding some predefined answers to your account. Here's how it is done:

1. Click the "+" sign on the Canned Responses page
2. Enter the title of the response
3. Enter the text of your response
4. Click "Create"

You can also add multiple canned messages at once. For instructions, please refer to the section "Import / Export" down below.

Edit existing predefined message

To edit an existing predefined answer:

1. Click the pencil icon next to the particular response you would like to edit
2. Make the necessary changes
3. Click "Save"

Delete predefined messages

To delete one or a group of canned responses:

1. Select one or multiple responses which you would like to delete
2. Click "Delete selected"
3. Click "Yes" to confirm the deletion

Sort predefined messages

Use the green up and down arrows alongside each of your canned responses to move the responses up and down the list as you need.

Alternatively, to place a response in the desired position on your list you can simply drag and drop it.

Assign and reassign predefined messages

Initially, you can create canned responses and assign them to:

• the whole company
• a specific department or multiple departments
• individual chat agents

Structuring your responses can greatly facilitate the workflow of the chat agents. You can create messages which are individual for each agent to make their communication more personal.

If you offer customer support in different languages or, let's say, you have teams who answer tech and sales questions separately, you can create separate departments for that and add responses per department.

This way every agent will not have to go through multiple irrelevant responses in search for the right one.

If later on you will need to delete a certain operator profile or a department, you can easily reassign their responses to another operator or department.

On the operator / department deletion confirmation screen you will be asked whether you want to keep or delete their canned responses and will be prompted to select whether you want to assign them to the whole company or a particular department / operator.

Group predefined messages

You can create custom groups for your canned messages using the following syntax: [group/subgroup/sub-subgroup/....] Title

For example: [General Questions/Contacts]Where are you located?

Having different groups helps the chat agents to navigate through canned messages more easily, especially if you have a lot of them.

Add formatting to predefined messages

The formatting options are offered with some limitations.

Keep in mind, that canned responses do not support HTML formatting and adding dynamic variables, such as OPERATOR, VISITOR, which could allow you to automatically add the operator's or the visitor's name to a response. However, they do support adding links and email addresses.

The maximum number of characters a canned response can contain is 64000.

Export and import predefined messages

To export, click the "Export canned responses to a .CSV file" link.

You can export all of your predefined answers or only the ones assigned to specific departments / operators. You will be offered these options on the export screen.

To import, click the "Create multiple canned responses from a spreadsheet" link.

You will see the a screen, which will contain the link to our template spreadsheet and the detailed instructions on how to correctly fill out the file.

Once you have added your canned responses to the template file, go back to the screen above and proceed with uploading it by clicking "Choose File" and "Create" buttons.

Transfer predefined messages to another account

To transfer canned responses between accounts:

1. Export your canned responses from the first account.
2. Open the exported .CSV file in a .CSV editor (Google Sheets, LibreOffice Calculator or MS Excel).
3. Go over all the fields in a file and make sure that operators and departments names and titles exactly match those of the second account to which you intend to transfer your predefined answers. If they don't match, you will receive an error screen and the import will fail.
4. Import the edited .CSV file to your second account.