In a customer support team, the ability to offer quick replies to queries in less time will get you all the social recognition you need with the best ratings.
For this, a canned response is one of the determinants to help businesses achieve a good customer satisfaction rate.
What exactly is this canned response? The pre-written messages for customer queries are repeated or are curated according to the most popular questions related to product sales, support issues, and promotions.
These canned messages for live chat are used to build conversations with customers and keep them engaged by offering solutions to their queries.
Also, these canned responses are set to engage with customers in a conversational style and maintain a calm tone to offer the best solution, which in turn, increases the productivity of the customer support agent.
Here we talk more about the use of canned responses and their importance in the customer support industry.
Best Practises for Using canned messages
1. Chats
- Maintain a Human Tone
On a customer support chat, there is limited time to respond to messages making it difficult to curate messages in the moment.
This is where a pre-set message template or a live chat canned response works well to respond with a quick message strip that is pre-written.
Crafting template messages for different customer support queries or scenarios will save you a lot of time and can attract positive reviews.
To create these templates, look into your previous chat replies for customer queries and take some time to tweak these messages to make them more conversational and speaks to the point.
- Do not copy texts from the website
When texting or emailing a customer, do not cut or copy texts from your official website and use them in your chats.
The above behavior will lead to unclear conversations and end up frustrating the customer which can even lead to losing them.
To avoid this, getting your messages verified by different members of your team and an honest self-evaluation can help churn out an effective message for customers.
- Keep your response messages short
If you are reaching out to a customer support executive on a chat, receiving a long text reply for a query can completely confuse you or anger you off.
Maintaining a chat reply that has close to 15-30 words will get it to read on live chats giving the right amount of information on the solution.
Offering answers or solutions in a readable short text snippet or paragraph will allow them to skim and eliminate the need to read chunky texts.
2. Emails
- Stay on point in a live chat or an Email
The whole point of setting up customer support is to answer people’s queries or solve problems when conversing.
Customer support agents should not include promotional lines or try to sell new products in conversations. This is a big runaway point for customers and would reflect a bad image of the brand.
When curating your customer support template, keep the replies to the point and do not make it too long an answer too. Yes, answers can’t be templatized for all situations and queries and in such cases, writing it by yourself would be great.
- Provide a call to action (CTA)
All a customer needs is a reply, direction, and a solution for his queries or problem when reaching out to the customer support agent.
If the customer is unhappy with the answer or the reply and is still confused, the customer should be given a direction to request a callback or an email ID for further assistance.
These CTAs can be placed below the canned responses or can be placed in the template when a customer support agent sends a reply.
- Personalized messages
As known to all, individually addressed messages or emails will always be a delightful thing to see for all of us.
If the responses for customers are personalized too, the customer involvement and their journey will be better as well.
Personalized individual messages can also result in influencing customer loyalty rates adding to the individual attention a brand offers to the customer.
(Image: Personalized Email canned response
Source: Freshdesk)
3 Ways to not use canned responses
In the suggestions below, we tell you where you shouldn’t be using canned responses as they might negatively impact your brand.
- If the customer query is unclear
A customer support agent should be clear about the query or a problem the customer is facing to help them arrive at the right solution.
If not, this would lead to a bigger issue that can end up costing a lot for the company to resolve the issue. It is better to confirm the complaint before suggesting solutions.
On the other hand, frustrated customers can leave your brand with a negative review on social media channels or on forums that can direct your potential customers to a competitor brand.
So, as much as possible, make the issue clear with the customer and suggest solutions for a prolonged customer relationship.
(Image: Canned response Mismatch
Source: Livechat)
- Shortage of time
Creating message templates in a hurry will end up with bad sentence structuring and a puzzled customer.
A canned response or a message template should always carry a positive inviting tone and not words that just resolve their queries without any additional or future thought into it.
For instance, when a customer reaches out to a customer support agent, greeting them and calmly conversing to hear out the problem then gradually leading to solutions is an effective way to customer appreciation.
But instead, rushing through the solutions and at the last sending them a feedback link will only attract bad review ratings.
- If canned responses need to be curated from scratch
If your customer support doesn’t have canned or templated responses, it is better to reply to a customer manually with the knowledge a customer support agent has.
Customers always appreciate an honest answer and who knows, this can also be one of the talking points about your brand that will skyrocket its success.
Accessing the situation and responding according to the status of the complaint will put a customer support agent on a hot rod, but ultimately will be perceived as caring and responsive.
Also, do not make the canned responses too courteous or extremely apologetic as they might be perceived as fake or unnatural by customers.
(Image: Canned apologetic email response
Source: Kayako)
Why do we need canned responses
One of the major reasons for canned responses would be to engage better with customers and make their journeys smoother. Also, the templatized format improves the conversations and offers the exact information needed. Here are some more plus points that we discuss in detail.
- Increase customer engagement
For a prolonged customer engagement, a well-crafted canned message that can help increase customer satisfaction is like a perfectly solved puzzle.
Messages that can drive conversations and guide customers to their preferred solutions need to be templatized. This can be used as an idea to create many iterations and tests.
Changes to the canned responses according to different businesses or brands have to be done as no templates should be the same and repeated. Personalization of messages should be maintained for customers and this could position the brand better.
- Improved customer complaint resolution time
Predefined messages will quicken the response time to customer complaints and also boosts the frequency of complaints handled every day.
If the customer receives a response within seconds, there is nothing like it and these quick responses can also get you good recognition among others striving to reach your level of customer support.
One of the important metrics that every customer support agent or team works hard to achieve is high first response rate. A canned response can easily help you achieve good first response rates that can improve customer satisfaction numbers.
- Better customer satisfaction scores
Canned responses can accelerate replies that in turn makes the customer happy to receive the solutions sooner.
Predefined messages that are curated based on common situations or FAQs can be of great help and have to be changed frequently.
Happy customers can turn into brand advocates making the brand a popular choice for many and increasing its prominence far and wide.
An increase in social media mentions and positive reviews will attract new customers. Also, a 24/7 customer support portal with perfect customer query responses and solutions for issues will no doubt raise customer loyalty and CSAT scores.
Need your canned responses automated?
We have the perfect solution to get your canned responses at the customer support portal saving you loads of time and resources.
It is a canned response service that can auto-generate replies for your customer support agents.
Kapture’s live chat feature can save you the time you take to create text templates for customer support with automated pre-defined templates for different businesses.
That’s not all, Kapture is the customer support automation platform that is powered by AI and machine learning capabilities made to perfectly ease processes at customer support.
Book a demo with us here.
About the Author | |
 | Sunith Ramachandra |
| Sunith Ramachandra says, “Content writing is all about using the right words for the right audience”. At kapture he does exactly the same writing content to create conversations and conversions online. | |
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