How to use canned messages for customer service?

Repeating the same answer, again and again, all day long, can be tedious, especially for your customer service team.

Canned messages, also known as canned responses or saved replies have been a game changer in the life of many customer service teams.

Nowadays, it's a standard feature that you can find in many customer service software for many reasons.

If you're not familiar with canned messages, this article is built for you.

We're going to review what a canned response is, what is the meaning of this expression and how you can make your canned responses better to improve customer service.

If you're already an intense user of canned responses, take advantage of our article that gives the best canned responses examples. It's made for sales, marketing, and support team. Enjoy!

What are canned messages?

Canned messages, also known as canned responses or canned answers, are templated messages for frequently asked questions related to sales, marketing, or support teams(or any other department in the company). They are used to engage semi-automatically, avoiding departments repeating themselves every time they get these repetitive questions.

With templated answers, customer service agents can promptly provide specific information that helps the conversation be efficient.

Using these answers at the right time across different conversations improves customer service productivity.

What does mean "canned message"?

As explained earlier, canned messages are templated messages. If we refer to the word as itself, it contains two distinct words:

• Canned
• Message

"Canned" means encapsulated, already existing. It refers to the fact that messages are protected from being retyped throughout the time.

"Message" means it contains content such as images, text, GIFs, videos ...

What kind of canned messages exists?

There are canned messages for pretty much every channel you're handling customer service.

For example, with a tool like Crisp, you can build canned responses for the entire team. Teams can then reuse templated messages on multiple channels, through the shared inbox.

Understanding this point, you'll be able to create canned email messages, live chat canned responses, or WhatsApp canned responses for your customer service from one tool. Using it will improve your customer support, making your agent more efficient on many channels while improving first response time.

How to create an excellent canned response for customer service?

Building canned responses for better customer service is relatively easy, particularly if you're using modern customer service software such as Crisp.

Here are some tips to help you create a canned response that makes your customers happy while enabling your teams to save time.

Personalize it based on locales

At Crisp, we offer customer support in multiple languages. This means customer service agents have to be responsive in different languages. To help them, we've created various versions of the same content based on customers' language.

For example, we have:
- Hello-fr
- Hello-es
- Hello-pt

And so on.

Personalize messages with macros

Sending canned messages might feel a bit robotic for your customers. That's why it is crucial to integrate some custom data to make your message more personalized.

For example, you could have something like:

Hey <CustomerName>,
It's <OperatorsName>, tell me how can I help you today.

That may sound basic, but very few companies can do so. You can even get way further by using the company name and other custom data that help your team to get closer to your customers.

Categorize your messages

Building canned responses might help your team ... A lot! But if you're creating too many templated answers, it might be a big mess!

To make the life of your customer service team much more accessible, you should think about categorizing your saved replies.

For example, at Crisp, we have these kinds of categories:
- Openers
- Product
- Discount (Yes, we have shortcuts for discounts)
- Competitors

Now that you know what canned messages are and how you can build the best canned responses, it's time to get started!

You don't have this feature available right in your mailbox or in your customer service software? Not a problem, you can get started with a Google Sheet document for example :).

In the following document, you'll find plenty of canned responses examples for your business.