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Canned Responses

Canned responses enable an agent to quickly select a pre-prepared answer with minimal keystrokes while communicating with a visitor. This feature proves handy as visitors often approach with typical, frequently asked questions, and some answers can be universal.

You can create canned responses at three levels:

  • Global Canned Responses — You can edit these in the General Settings section, and all agents will see them.

  • Team Canned Responses — You can edit these in the Edit Department section, and the staff of that department will see them.

  • Personal Canned Responses — You can edit these in the Agent Properties section, and only a specific agent will see them.

In the Agent Workspace, the system first displays an agent's personal canned responses, followed by global canned responses, and then department canned responses. When you add new canned responses, the system saves them in the order you added them. You can change the order by deleting and entering the canned responses in a new sequence.

For an agent, you can either display department canned responses from all departments where the staff member is part or only the canned responses of the department to which you sent the chat. The system parameter visitor_dep_answers determines this: if its value is true, the system displays only the canned responses of the department of inquiry as team canned responses; if false, the system displays the canned responses of all the agent's departments.

How an Agent Works with Canned Responses

While an agent is typing a response to a visitor, Chat Platform shows suggestions — canned responses that contain similar text.

An agent can use the Up and Down keys on the keyboard (or the mouse) to select one of the response options. Then, the agent must press the Enter key to send the selected canned response to the user.

An agent can also manually select a canned response from the list of all available responses. A button that displays this list is located under the input line in the Agent Workspace:

Adding and Editing Canned Responses

You can add and edit canned responses for agents, departments, and global responses in the following ways:

  • For global canned responses, go to the General settings of your Chat Platform account. From the menu, navigate to the General page, and on that page, select Canned Responses.

  • For team canned responses, in the Team section of the menu, navigate to the Departments page. Go to the settings of the department you need. On the Departments page, select the department you want and click the pencil icon in the Action field. On the Edit Department page, choose Templates.

  • For personal canned responses, navigate to the settings of the agent you need. From the Team section in the menu, go to the Staff page. On the Staff page, select the agent you want and click the pencil icon in the Action field. On the Agent Properties page, choose Templates.

Here's the description of the canned response parameters:

  • Language: Select the language for which you want to view or edit the set of canned responses. There is a separate set of canned responses for each language. The set of canned responses provided to the agent depends on the language of the current dialogue.

  • Templates: The list of canned responses is a table with the following fields:

    • Name: You can give a canned response a title, which is especially useful when the text of the response is too long; assigning a title is optional.

    • Text: This is the text of the canned response that will be sent to the visitor.

    • Section: Enter the name of the section if you want to group several canned responses in one section; assigning a section is optional.

    • Action: Here, icons are displayed, and each one executes one of the commands related to the selected canned response when clicked.

Storing Canned Responses in the Database

Canned responses are stored in the database in JSON format. Here's an example of a JSON file with canned responses:

"answers": {
        "de": [
            {
                "name": "Begrüßung",
                "text": "Hallo, wie kann ich Ihnen helfen?",
                "section": "Begrüßungen/Abschiede"
            },
            {
                "name": "Abschied",
                "text": "Ich hoffe, ich konnte Ihnen helfen. Auf Wiedersehen!",
                "section": "Begrüßungen/Abschiede"
            }
        ],
        "en": [
            {
                "name": "Hello",
                "text": "Hello, how may I help you?",
                "section": ""
            }
        ]
    }

If you need to upload a large number of canned responses, you can prepare a list of the required responses and then task the addition of them directly through the database. To do this, please contact our technical support.