10 Canned Response Examples & How to Use Them Effectively

10 Examples of canned responses

Canned replies can either be automated or manually copied and pasted into a live chat, email, or direct message. To fully automate the process, you'll need to understand the different types of canned responses, ranging from greetings to closing the support ticket and asking for customer feedback.

Here are a few of the different types of canned response examples you can use when handling customer inquiries:

Greeting a customer

Greeting costumes on live chat lets you start the conversation on the right foot. Many live chat tools automatically greet customers as soon as they visit a website, ensuring they know that the live chat feature is available if needed. However, you may also choose to greet customers after they've already submitted an inquiry.

Something like, "Hi, my name is [name]. How can I help you today?" is simple enough to encourage customers to communicate with you online.

However, if the customer has already submitted an inquiry with details and information about their issue, you may need to fine-tune your greeting to include another canned response.

Requesting more information

In most cases, customers won't provide your customer service team with all the essential pieces of information they need to resolve a customer issue up front.

For instance, if someone wants to know their bank account balance, they'll need to provide the customer service rep with information to help them verify the customer and identify their bank accounts.

After a customer responds to your initial greeting, you can ask for more information with a canned response similar to, "Thanks for sharing! To complete the process, we'll need the following pieces of information from you: [list of requests]:"

Providing instructions

Customers may also send you a message when they need help using a product. In these cases, you should provide easy-to-understand instructions similar to those you'd send with the product.

Taking customer complaints

Handling complaints is critical to any customer service rep's job, and learning about customers' sentiments toward your products can help you build a better business. However, when customers complain, they're already unhappy, so you'll need to be more delicate with the situation. Customers usually expect a resolution to their issues as soon as possible.

You can use the following canned response when customers complain about a particular product or aspect of a product:

"I understand your frustration. Can you provide more information about [customer issue] so we can come up with a solution?"

Acknowledging a mistake

Customer service agents are human and make mistakes. However, customers are usually willing to forgive mistakes as long as the company takes responsibility. You can use canned responses to help resolve the issue to keep your customers satisfied. An example might be:

"Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We're sorry for any inconvenience this has caused. Our solution is to [solution]."

Here, providing as much information about how you'll fix your mistake is crucial and can help ease your customers' minds while de-escalating the situation.

Escalating an issue

Escalating customer issues to someone higher up, such as a manager, is common practice since many angry or upset customers typically want to talk to the person in charge. You can put your customers' minds at ease by escalating the situation when deemed necessary.

Of course, you should have a list of situations that should be escalated to help your customer service team understand which types of inquiries should be handled by another person.

When you do escalate issues, you can send the customer a canned response, such as:

"Thank you so much for reaching out. This type of situation is best handled by [another person or team], who will resolve the issue for you. What's the best way to reach you?"

Addressing an issue

Customer service representatives can resolve most customer concerns. When a customer has an issue, they want a fast resolution. Your canned response should include clear information about how you'll resolve the issue and what the customer can expect. Here's an example:

"Thanks for reaching out. We're currently investigating the situation and will get back to you as soon as possible. If you do not hear back within 48 hours, please feel free to follow up with us."

Other issues are more specific. For instance, if the customer didn't receive their order, your canned response might look like this:

"Thanks for reaching out. We're very sorry you haven't received your order. While we look into this issue, we'll send a replacement today. You can expect it by [delivery date]."

Of course, your canned response for each issue will largely depend on company policies. For instance, your business might not allow you to send replacements without further investigation.

Providing updates

Some customer issues can't be resolved successfully in a single communication. However, even if your team is still working toward a resolution, you should continue to provide the customer with updates. For instance, if you sell software, your customer might run into an issue or bug. In this case, your canned response might be:

"Hi [customer name], Thanks for reporting your issue. We're writing to inform you it's now fixed. Please let us know if you continue to experience problems."

On the other hand, an eCommerce business might need to provide updates on order tracking or resolutions that take more time. If a customer's order was lost in the mail and you had to investigate, you might send this canned response:

"Hi [customer name], Thanks for letting us know you have not received your package. We investigated the issue, and it appears the package was delayed in transit. It is now on the way and will be delivered by [date].

Closing an issue

You can close the issue once you've satisfied the customer's request. Of course, you should only close the issue once you've actually solved the customer's problem. Then, you can send them a canned response thanking them for contacting your business and providing them with any other information they need to know. To close the issue, you can send a canned response similar to the following:

"Looks like everything is good to go! Your order will arrive on [date]. I appreciate your patience. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

Confirming satisfaction

You can end the conversation once the customer tells you they no longer have any questions. However, you should also confirm that the customer is satisfied with your service. Asking for customer feedback can help you determine if your customer service responses are performing well.

You can send an automated message asking them to rate their experience as soon as the inquiry is closed out. For this, you can use a response like:

"Thank you for choosing [business name]! Please take a moment to tell us about your experience today."

Then, you can ask them to rate it using a star rating or allow them to provide short answers.

What are the benefits of using canned responses?

The main purpose of canned responses is to be more efficient than having customer support agents manually search for and find answers to common customer questions. Canned responses benefit both internal teams and customers, allowing you to provide a better customer experience while supporting customer service reps who need to spend time on more complicated customer service issues.

Here are the three significant benefits of using canned responses for sales and customer service:

Faster response times

With a good canned response, customer service reps don't have to spend valuable time thinking about how to respond to a particular inquiry. Not all of your customer service agents can type quickly or handle multiple customer inquiries at once if they're focused on delivering exceptional service to everyone.

However, when you use canned responses, you can help customer service reps save time, allowing them to deliver good service to several customers at once while reducing waiting times.

Workflow efficiency

Predefined responses are a type of customer service automation because they allow you to automatically respond to customer inquiries. Using pre-written responses during a conversation with a customer can eliminate repetitive, time-consuming work to free up more time for more important tasks.

10 Canned Response Examples & How to Use Them Effectively | Mailchimp (2024)