Ready made Canned Responses, and the art of employing them

100% of your customers would like instant responses to their queries (won’t they?). However, only a fraction of businesses really understand this and do something about it.

Pro tip: It makes a lot of sense to reply to customers instantly and convert/retain them when they are in the right mindset –– actively thinking about your product.

But, some issues never stop chasing us –– like, the minimum time it takes to write lengthy messages. Or, the frustration that accompanies it – for both the customer and agent. Frustration also grows when you have to write the same messages over and over again for different customers. C’mon, humans have feelings! It’s even worse when it comes to writing messages that are similar in nature, but not the exact same and require extra customization before being sent.

This isn’t a new problem, though, and the solution to it has been pretty standard in the customer support industry too – canned responses, or shortcut replies, which we will learn more about in a second.

Next, we introduce you to our handy, ready-made canned responses – so that you don't even have to create your own.

What are Canned Responses?

Canned Responses are saved replies to commonly asked questions, that can be instantly accessed through your message editor box while chatting with customers. These pre-written responses, carefully preserved in the system like well-preserved foods (canned), save you a lot of time and effort, while ensuring consistent and accurate replies.

For example, this is how you can access a canned response (saved in Settings) from the omnichannel chat box in Chatwoot:

Advantages of using canned responses

Canned Responses are a great ammo. They help with:

Swiftness

Not that ☝️ Swift, but swiftly sending messages to your customers. Whenever a customer query comes in, canned responses can instantly be accessed from the message editor. This sharply reduces typing time and ensures quick replies for customers, and convenience for the agents.

Scalability

As your business grows, the volume of support queries grow. So it becomes essential to scale up your team while maintaining a high quality of customer service. Canned responses, however, ease this up by allowing a smaller support team to handle a larger workload by easing up the response process.

Agent productivity

Agents save a ton of time by actively using canned responses. This leaves them with more room to attend more customers in a shorter amount of time.

Faster resolutions

Canned responses are a great catalyst in helping resolve queries faster. This promotes higher customer satisfaction, which in turn helps with better retention and revenues.

Consistency

As an organization, if you care about communicating with customers in a singular, consistent language, then canned responses are a great way to create scripts for all agents and have them abide by those scripts.

Quality control

Having high quality standards of communication with customer is crucial for retaining them and maintaining a decent brand image. This includes the kind of tone and language you use as a company, the degree of grammatical accuracy you put out, the calm with which you talk to customers, and many more similar standards you may have. Canned Responses help you ensure that the entire organization practices these standards as one.

Canned Responses Library by Chatwoot

You will easily find the Canned Responses feature in many support tools that lets you save frequent messages to a library and instantly use them in conversations later.

But, what if…hear us out…we also took away the pain of writing these messages in the first place? 👀

We have crafted (and really, crafted) a full Canned Responses Library – a collection of 124 replies that can be used in commonly-occurring support situations like greeting a customer, dealing with angry customers, transferring chats, etc.

When in need, open the library and select a category you need a response in, or simply search for it using the search bar. When you find a message you like, simply copy it or edit it before copying.

How to make the best of Canned Responses Library?

We have designed this library keeping in mind common support situations faced by agents. There are two ways we recommend using it, as explained below.

Add Canned Responses Library as a dashboard app

It makes sense to have the library open in a side tab while chatting with customers. However, it is way easier to rather add it as a dashboard app inside your account.

What are dashboard apps?

Dashboard apps is a way to directly access any 3rd party app from your Chatwoot dashboard. Once added, you don’t need to exit the Chatwoot window.

Adding this library as a dashboard app will only takes about 10 seconds to setup:

Once setup, you can instantly have shortcut replies at your fingertips.

Related read: How Tegrus uses Dashboard Apps to triple its sales

Use AI Assist to optimize messages

Support procedures may be standard but every conversation is unique. This means there is always room for sending a better message that would be more relevant to the specific, ongoing conversation.

We recently introduced AI assist in Chatwoot. One of the main things it does is improve your messages based on tone. When clubbed with canned responses, this completes the circle of crafting a message, and reviewing and improving it before sending.

Jumpstart to craft your own arsenal of support messages

Some repetitive messages you send to your customers will always be unique to your business. Messages such as pricing info, product features info, refund info are some examples. You may even have a unique style of greeting customers, making the need of having your own arsenal of support messages even more practical.

We recommend taking time to save your own canned responses in Chatwoot, using our library as a base.

Tips to find the Canned Responses that work best for you

Here are some tips.

Track your Frequently Asked Questions

Canned Responses would work the best for you when you know which ones you need the most. And the best way to know that is to recognize the questions you regularly get. Once you know, you can take sweet time to write the best possible responses for them and save in the system for everyone in your team to use.

One practice, that we follow at Chatwoot, to recognize patterns in the questions we get is to have everyone on support note down their findings or questions not covered in our documentation, in a Notion doc. We review this Notion doc later to not only update our canned responses, but also our documentation, making it more comprehensive and helpful for the customers. This, also, reduces support queries in return. Win-win!

Related read: 9 clever ways companies are using FAQ Pages to win customers

Keep CTAs handy

Calls to Action or CTAs are helpful when it comes to inciting action from the customer’s end. When editing canned responses, and if the situation permits, include a CTA in your message.

For example, give the link to your pricing and checkout page for a customer inquiring about pricing. Or, give YouTube link to your product demo to a customer actively considering a purchase.

Understand the intent of the customer

Offering chicken wings to a hungry customer isn’t always the best solution. You need to ask whether they are vegetarian or not. The lesson here is that misguided actions (in our case: responses to customers) wouldn’t work very well until you try to find out what the customer really wants or needs.

So ask follow up questions before blindly utilizing templated responses. Hey, save a canned response for that too! We did create a category called “Ask for more information” in our library.

Understand the sentiment of the customer

After intent, understanding the sentiment of the customer is equally important. Identifying whether they are in a neutral or angry mood will help you effectively resolve their issue without causing them further pain.

For dealing with uncomfortable situations, we made categories like ‘Don’t know’, ‘Admit fault’, ‘We don’t support that’, and ‘Angry customers’ in the library.

Quality over quantity

If possible, take the time and effort to personally cater to every customer on your support chat. Use canned responses as a helpful tool but do not start relying on it for complete, scripted chats. While this is unavoidable in large teams, try to internalize the practice of helping customers with their unique situations with the intent of genuinely helping them succeed.

Make room for improvizations

While scripts are a great tool for scaling up operations, your agents will also be met with situations not covered in scripts. It is essential to make room for improvisations, while being real with customers. Creating a knowledge base for the agents also comes in handy in such situations.

Improving customer experiences at scale

Our motto is to help businesses impart exceptional customer experiences, at scale. We would love to hear your feedback about the Canned Responses Library. Feel free to request more library content by hitting us up on the live chat button.