Canned Responses

Canned Responses are a great way to answer your customers more efficiently. You can prepare short messages, links, or even entire articles in your database and call upon them anytime during a chat.

In this article, you'll learn:

• How to add a canned response
• How to save a message as a canned response
• How to send a canned response
• How to start a flow from inside a conversation

Canned Responses and their benefits

At Tidio, we understand Canned Responses as the pre-defined responses to the most common questions your website visitors & customers may have. Using canned responses comes with a few main benefits:

Save Time

Pre-defined Canned Responses can improve your efficiency and reduce your chat handling time while using them when handling tons of questions every day.

Confidence

Boost your team's confidence in solving the most common customer issues. Help your operators be prepared for your customer's questions with ready-to-use answers.

Control

Your brand voice matters, and so do the messages your operators send on behalf of the business. Canned Response can help you set the tone of the messages to ensure customer satisfaction.

Easy management

You can organize your Canned Responses with tags that allow you to create separate categories for easy management & increased searchability.

Add Canned Responses

To add a new canned response, head to Settings > Canned Responses section:

Click on the Add a new Canned Response button in the upper-right corner to create a new response:

You'll see a new window where you can type in your Canned Response and decide whether you wish the canned response to stay private (only to your view) or visible to all agents. 

Your own private responses will be shown in their own category, visible only to you:

You can also use tags to organize the canned responses into categories based on the customers' questions or as names for specific canned responses to find them quickly during the conversation.

You can choose already existing tags from the drop-down list after clicking on the Add tags field or create one by starting to type a new tag name.

Tags help you to easily find the right canned response by typing the tag itself during a conversation:

... or by accessing the list of responses from the tag list:

Create a Canned Response from the conversation

You can also create a new canned response directly from the Conversation section. To add a new canned response, hover the mouse over the already sent message and click on the lightning icon on the right side.

You'll see a new window where you can edit the canned Response, add tags, and decide whether the Response should be private or visible for all operators.

Send a Canned Response

Chat

To send a Canned Response during a chat with your customer, click on the Canned responses icon on the bottom-left of your conversation:

... or type in the "/" (forward slash) into the text box in your conversation panel).

You can now choose the Response from the list of all responses or look for the categories on the left to quickly find an issue type and categorized answers.

• /Hello will find you all the responses with the "Hello" word inside
• /Order delivery will find all the responses containing the "Order delivery" phrase

Use the Tab key to switch between the Canned Responses and Flows sections for easy navigation.

Ticket

You can also use Canned Responses when composing emails (responding to existing tickets or creating new ones). Inside the ticket creation view, you will find the Canned Responses icon at the bottom:

You will find the same icon available when replying inside existing tickets:

Start a flow

A flow may be helpful here if you need to prepare longer messages with links or pictures.

You can trigger a flow while you chat by opening the Flows list at the bottom, or by typing in the "/" (forward slash) + Tab keys and choosing a flow from the list - the method is the same as with Canned Responses.

If you'd like to learn more, you can see our article about Flows in Live Conversations.