One of the things that customer service agents absolutely HATE is having to type full replies to customers. There are many things that they’ll do which are quite repetitive, and having to type the same response each & every time gets frustrating to say the least.

As I’ve covered previously at Quick Responses in Omnichannel, Omnichannel has the ability for Quick Replies. With these, agents are able to select the response that they’re wanting to use, and quickly populate it into the chat session that they’re having.

It’s also possible, using ‘slugs’, to set up responses that will automatically populate with specific pieces of information in the system. For example, something like ‘Good morning, my name is {Agent Name}, how may I assist you?’ will automatically populate the name of the agent into the chat session.

This is great; the main drawback to date has been that Omnichannel administrators are required to set these up, as well as maintain them. That’s not so great, when you consider that agents might want to personalise their responses as well. To date, that’s not able to be done within the system.

However, with Wave 2 2020, it’s now possible to allow agents to create their own quick replies, to be able to be used within chat sessions. It’s also not particularly difficult to go about getting this into the system, as we’ll see below.

The Omnichannel Administrator simply needs to go to the Personal Quick Replies section, and change the toggle to ‘Yes’, then save. This will enable personal quick replies for agents simply & swiftly.

Once the system setting has been set, and is active (it can take a few minutes to refresh through), agents are then able to start setting up their own quick replies.

To do this, agents will need to be in the Omnichannel for Customer Service app, and select the Personalisation option from the drop-down menu:

This will then open the agent personalisation tab, which has several different sections on it. The first one is the one that we’re interested in – Personal Quick Replies:

Here will list any personal quick replies that have already been set up by the agent, as well as give the option to create further ones to use:

Clicking this option brings up the familiar interface to set this up:

Note: Personal quick replies aren’t localised in Omnichannel. That’s why you need to select a Locale for the record. To be able to provide the quick response in multiple languages, create a specific response for each language, and select the locale that’s appropriate for it

Once the record is saved, it’s then possible to add tag/s to it for referencing:

Note: If you want to use the hash character (#), you can only use it at the beginning of the tag, not anywhere else in it

Once these have saved, they’re then available to be selected from the chat by the agent. The chat interface will show both system & personal quick replies. Typing ‘/q’ into the chat window will bring these up:

We can select the tab at the top to show just the personal quick replies that the agent has set up:

Alternatively, if the agent starts searching with text, they can easily distinguish between system & personal quick replies by looking at the icon against each one. System replies have a globe-style icon, whereas personal replies have a person-style icon:

So in summary, I think that this is a really great feature to add onto the original way of quick replies working. It’ll free up time for the Omnichannel Administrators, and allow agents to put their own responses in that they need. It’s also possible to share this using the OOB record sharing functionality, which means that a team lead can set them up, and then share them with the rest of the team!

How do you think this could enable or help you? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!