How to better navigate our canned responses


Our customer support team has grown significantly in the past year, and with this bigger team, we are starting to notice some serious problems with how FD handles canned responses.  Our C.R. database has become pretty big, and finding the right one has become increasingly difficult.  It's not practical to try to scan through all the CR's in a given category, so we have to use the text search field, which is very problematic.  


Here's an example:  We have a CR named "How do I use my activation code?"  If I enter that exact text into the search field, I'll get a long list of CR's, and the correct one is the ninth on on the list!  Most of the search results don't even contain most of the words in my search term, even if it put it in quotations marks!


Right now, to train new support staff, we have no choice but to tell them that they have to simply memorize the which search terms will produce each CR, which obviously will not be sustainable as our company grows.  There doesn't seem to be any logic in the way FreshDesk searches CR's, and there don't appear to be any advanced search options.  I really hope there's a better way!


10 replies

+1 we have over 700 canned responses and deal with the same complications.

Usually when I post on these forums, someone from FD will get back to me with a solution.  The fact that this hasn't happened this time leads me to believe that there is no solution.




It seems crazy that FD is adding all these new bells and whistles when the core functionality is still so flawed.


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Hello Jeremy,




We're really sorry that we missed out on updating the thread. As you pointed out right,we generally make sure that the newer posts are updated frequently but due to a small technical glitch, the replies from our team didn't get stamped on this thread. Hang on, one of our support heroes will be in touch with you soon !


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Update : 




We're working on a fix that will enhance the search functionality within the canned responses section




Cheers!



That's good news, thanks. I hope you'll also consider adding the option to tag canned responses, just like how we tag tickets.



Thank you for bringing this up, Jeremy. We have over 520 canned responses in our system and we're facing the same problem with FD. 




To Aravind, I appreciate you guys giving us an update. Hopefully the enhancement gets implemented a few months from now. It's really difficult for us to look past this functionality as it's an essential part of how we provide customer service and support to our clients.


The canned responses feature is great! But our list of canned responses is also growing. This brings these issues:

  1. For new people onboarding the team it is very difficult to know what is on this list of premade answers.
  2. Since not all our agents have access to go into the canned response UI, but they can use them, it is very hard for those agents to know what is going on with all the canned responses.
  3. We need to update or remove certain content after a while, but this is very challenging I cannot find a canned response (and currently the search only searches in the titles), I may want to add a new one, causing duplicates, or our support agents might want to find out for themselves, redoing the work. 

Having a way we can easily export or extract all the content easily, would help to manage the canned responses in a more professional way? 

I noticed the API (v2) does not allow for extraction of this data. 


For managing canned responses, getting a wiki-like overview (or like in Freshdesk's solutions part) would really improve this feature we use daily:

  • for the admins would already be a great help
  • and for the new onboarders to learn all the available canned responses
  • and for the existing teams: see what is available


I see that there is already some other feature requests available:

https://support.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/314280

https://support.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/318975


Let's hope Freskdesk/Freshworks picks this up soon to make this very useful feature even more efficient.



I see also this related request: https://support.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/314280 and https://support.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/318975


I have a problem that seems to correspond to this thread. 

When I am in the Sandbox and try to search for a CR it shows "We couldn´t find any matching results" (see screenshot).

I tried it with the title of the CR and also with content, same result.

image



Is there any update on this? Trying to find a particular canned response in a giant group is next to impossible. I've downloaded some via API but then I have to add to Excel and cross reference, because I can 1) only pull the names of the folders or 2) pull one folder at a time if I want the data inside the folder. A way to download these would be extremely helpful. 


Also add: even a "Search" feature for keywords inside of the canned responses would be helpful. 


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