Canned responses could completely transform your customer’s support experience, and here’s why.
Nowadays, customers expect support to be helpful, personalized, and quick. In fact, around 12% of users expect a response in just 15 minutes from a support agent. When we compare that to the actual average response of 12 hours, canned responses are a clear game changer.
Yes, canned responses are a fantastic way to make sure your customers get the response they are expecting as quickly as possible. Not only can they save you and your customers a huge amount of time, but they can have a serious impact on your support metrics (all good, of course).
So, what does a good canned response look like? And how can you make sure you have the best canned responses for your customers? We’ll help you solve these questions and more, including:
- What are Canned Responses?
- Why you should use Canned Responses
- How to create great Canned Responses
- Automate Customer Support with Saved Replies/Canned Responses
Let’s get into it, shall we?
What are Canned Responses?
Canned responses are pre-written messages implemented in a live chat or other messaging channels that allow businesses to respond immediately to a customer’s inquiry.
There are two main ways canned responses can be used as part of your support strategy:
- Reduce response time for FAQs and other common inquiries
- Maintain communication with customers when support agents are busy
Remember, no canned message can ever replace the communication of support agents. However, when done correctly, canned messages are a fantastic way to automate communication and optimize your key support metrics.
Why you should use Canned Responses
Yes, canned responses help save time for your support agents, and also ensure that communication remains consistent for all your customers. However, they can also have a huge impact on your support metrics. Let’s take a look:
- Boost average response time. You can program canned responses to respond immediately to the customer’s first message, majorly reducing your average first response time.
- Increase customer engagement. Canned messages can be the key to keeping your customers engaged and making sure they don’t abandon their efforts.
- Speed up average resolution time. The quicker you can provide a response with an answer to your customers, the quicker their inquiries are resolved.
- Reduce the number of open tickets for support agents. Canned responses can help take care of the general FAQs and queries, freeing support agents from a lot of open tickets.
- Increase CSAT/NPS. All of the above benefits help get those all-important customer satisfaction scores and net promoter scores sky-high.
Who knew pre-determined messages could have such a major impact on your support metrics? Well, we did. To learn more about the importance of these support metrics, check out this blog post.
How to create great Canned Responses
It’s important to note that canned responses can either have a positive impact on key support metrics like the ones above or, they can do the exact opposite. To help you make sure your canned responses are helping your overall support strategy, here are our top tips to create some great canned responses.
Create responses for the Most Frequently Asked Questions
Canned responses work great for your customers’ most frequently asked questions. By doing this, you can help a large number of customers resolve their queries, rather than just a few. You can use existing chat data to identify which queries are the most common and start creating canned responses for each one.
Add the most visited Knowledge Base articles to your responses
Similar to the FAQs, this tip allows you to create canned responses that will reach a larger audience. By identifying which Knowledge Base articles are visited the most, and corresponding these to the relevant FAQs, you can add links to these articles to encourage a self-service support approach to help reduce resolution time.
Personalize Canned Messages as much as possible
Customers love personalized communication. It adds that human touch and shows that you care. And it’s easier to achieve in canned responses than you may think! Many tools designed for this job allow you to add variables to your messages to help personalize your messages. This can be as simple as adding their name to the response.
Know when a Canned Message isn’t appropriate
In some situations, a canned response just won’t cut it, and it could make the interaction even worse. It’s important to identify these unique circumstances and prioritize your support agents delivering the most appropriate response. These situations may be serious complaints, recurring issues, etc.
Not sure your support agents are fully trained to deal with these types of situations? We suggest perfecting your employee onboarding so they become experts on your products.
Ask for customer feedback after a completed interaction
Customer feedback is golden in almost every aspect of your business, support included. By creating a canned response asking for feedback after a ticket has been solved, you can get a clear picture as to whether your current support strategy is working, and where it’s not. Maybe you need to add another canned response about a certain query, maybe your responses aren’t personalized enough. Whatever it is, customer feedback will tell you exactly what you need to hear.
Use a Product Success Platform (PSP) to help you
Doing all of the above won’t be possible without having a platform to help you. Product Success Platforms like FROGED are designed to optimize your customer experience through great customer support features.
In fact, FROGED provides a Saved Replies tool that allows you to create personalized canned responses for your live chat. This tool allows you to:
- Create unlimited saved replies: Create as many saved messages as you need to tackle FAQs and other common queries.
- Personalize your responses: Use variables to personalize the message to each customer, and add images or links for extra value.
- Save replies for the future: All your replies are saved and at your fingertips so you can choose the right response to send to a customer in seconds.
- Edit existing replies: Continue optimizing your existing saved replies according to your customer’s needs with our easy way to edit.
The saved replies tool is just one aspect of FROGED’s omnichannel support solution for SaaS companies. Integrating this as part of your support strategy allows you to create personalized product flows, segment user communication based on behavior, offer self-serve support options, and much, much more.
Sounds pretty impressive, we know. Well, why not try it out for yourself? Book a free demo with us to see how you can implement a proactive customer support solution that maximizes your customer retention and product adoption!
Automate Customer Support with Saved Replies/Canned Responses
All-in-all, canned responses are an extremely useful way to hugely reduce response times within your support, and free up your support agents’ time by solving the most common customer queries.
Getting these responses right can have a serious impact on your customer experience, including engagement and customer satisfaction. We recommend focusing on the FAQs of your customers and personalizing your canned responses so that they feel human and genuine.
Of course, the real star of the show is finding a platform that will help streamline and optimize the creation and management of your canned responses. With a platform like FROGED, you can create, personalize, edit, and manage endless saved replies in a single platform, ready to use in your live chat.
Check out FROGED’s customer support solution to implement saved replies and more proactive features within your own support strategy!