Canned responses: save a reply once, send it often

Support work repeats itself. The same question about delivery times, the same greeting, the same three sentences explaining your refund window — typed again by whoever happens to be on shift, slightly differently each time.

A canned response is that answer saved once and dropped into a conversation in two keystrokes. They live under Replies in the console, on a page called Canned responses.

Who can do what

An operator who cannot reach a template is an operator who retypes it, so using them is open to everyone. Writing them is workspace configuration, like every other setting, and stays with owners and admins.

Templates belong to the workspace, not to the person who wrote them. There is no private set. Whoever is on shift sees the same list.

Write one

Replies, then Add template. Two fields:

A workspace can hold 200 templates.

The title is worth a moment's thought, because it is what your team reads under pressure at three in the afternoon. "Refund — outside 30 days" beats "Refund 2".

One number worth noticing: a template holds up to 4000 characters while a chat message holds 5000. That gap is deliberate — a template is meant to be the bulk of a reply with room left to add the specifics.

Use one in a conversation

Two routes, and the second is the one your team will end up living in.

The button

The Canned response button sits in the composer's toolbar. It opens the list with a search box, and picking one drops it into the reply.

It appends rather than replaces: whatever you have already typed stays, and the template goes underneath it, separated by one blank line. So the ordinary shape — a personal first line, then the standard explanation — works without any copy-pasting.

The "/" shortcut

Type / as the first character of an empty reply and the same list opens. Then:

• Keep typing to narrow it — /refund.
• ↑ and ↓ walk the list, Enter inserts the highlighted one, Esc closes it and leaves what you typed as ordinary text.
• The /refund you typed is not part of the reply. It is the query, and it is gone the moment a template lands.

Three things about the trigger that save a confused minute later:

• Only at the very start of an empty draft. A slash inside a sentence is punctuation — "we are open 9/5" opens no menu.
• A line break ends it. Once you have pressed Shift+Enter you are writing a reply, not picking a template.
• Replies only, never notes. A template is customer-facing copy; an internal note is your team talking to itself.

What the search actually searches

The same search on both routes, and it reads the whole template, not just the title. /shipped finds a template whose body says "ships" — the search understands word stems in your workspace's language.

A quoted phrase searches that phrase, and a leading minus excludes a word: refund -shipping. Title matches rank above body matches, so a template actually named "Refund" comes first.

What inserting does not do

It does not send anything. The template lands in the composer as ordinary editable text — change a name, delete a sentence, add the specifics of this customer's problem, then send it yourself. That is the whole point: a canned response is a starting point, not a macro that fires.

One refusal you may meet: if what you have already typed plus the template would go over the 5000-character message limit, the insert is refused rather than trimmed, and the screen says so. Silently cutting a template would lose text you never saw go missing.

Editing and deleting

Edit template and Delete template are on each row of the Replies page.

Neither touches a reply already sent. Inserting a template copies its text into the message; from that moment the two have nothing to do with each other. Fixing a typo in a template does not fix it in yesterday's conversations, and deleting one does not blank out the replies it produced.

The list has its own search box, over the same whole-text search described above, which is how you find a template to edit in a workspace that has accumulated a hundred of them.

Where to start

The templates that pay for themselves first are rarely the long ones. In rough order of how often they earn their keep:

• The greeting. Sent more than anything else, and the one where typing it fresh every time is pure waste.
• The three questions you always ask before you can help — order number, screenshot, browser.
• The policy paragraph where the wording matters and every operator improvising it is a risk: refunds, delivery windows, what your warranty covers.
• The holding line — "I am checking this with our warehouse, I will come back to you within the hour" — which is the difference between a customer waiting and a customer wondering.

What is not worth saving is anything you would edit beyond recognition every time. A template you always rewrite is slower than typing.