Commands

If your teams are stuck in constantly repeating common replies and actions, you can unleash productivity across your teams with commands (or macros). Commands can help your frontline teams like support agents manage high volumes of customer queries by providing repetitive standard responses and actions in a single click. This enhances productivity, reduces response time, and maintains consistent communication quality, thereby improving overall customer satisfaction.

A command is a single-click shortcut or macro. Commands can be configured to send predefined responses or take actions, such as updating a specific field. Responses can include replies to customers or internal colleagues. They can be personalized with placeholder variables that are dynamically resolved based on the context in which a command is applied.

Benefits of using commands

Efficiency: Apply commands to perform repetitive actions quickly, reducing the number of clicks and keystrokes.
Consistency: Maintain uniformity in responses across the team, reflecting current policies and communication style.
Error reduction: Minimize manual mistakes by standardizing responses and actions.
Enhanced productivity: Handle more tickets in less time, increasing throughput.
Customer satisfaction: Deliver faster and personalized responses, enhancing the customer experience.
Automate repetitive actions: Enhance saved responses with automated actions for owner or group reassignment, stage updates, tag management, and other field updates, streamlining your workflow.
Team-specific commands: Specify Available to to control whether a command is for all teams or specific teams, tailoring commands to different group needs.
Customize access control: Control who can create and update commands. Admins have this ability by default, but you can now assign custom roles to other groups for more flexible command management.

Creating commands

Go to Settings > Commands > + Command.
Fill in the details, including the Surface (which objects the command should be available on). The Status can be one of the following:
- Draft: Not ready yet for being used on records but need to be reviewed and published.
- Active: Published and available to be used in your day-to-day work on respective surfaces.
- Inactive: Deactivated and cannot be used on any record unless changed to Active again.
Define the formatted response that you want to send when you run the command. You can use placeholder variables that will be auto-filled from the record when the command is run and you can review and send the final response after editing if needed. Placeholder variables that are supported will be specific to the record for which you are defining the command.
Configure predefined actions that the command can execute. For example, assigning a different owner or group to a ticket, moving the ticket or conversation to a different stage, or adding or removing tags. For user type fields, you can use Current User to assign the field to the user executing the command. For example, a support agent working on a ticket can use a command to set themselves as the owner if the action configured in the command specifies the owner field as Current User.

Managing commands

View All Commands: Access a centralized list of draft, active, and inactive commands. You can sort and filter these commands based on their properties or attributes.
Edit or clone commands: Make changes to existing commands and reuse commands with some minimal changes by cloning them.
Deactivate or delete commands: Review the commands collection and deactivate commands that are not needed anymore. Commands that are made inactive will still be present in the system and can be activated for use again. If there is clear conviction that something will not be needed, delete them permanently from the system.
Share a command with relevant people: A command shortcut can be useful for your entire company or it might be specific to the processes of one or more teams. Using the Available to field in a command, you can specify whether it should be used by everyone or only by one or more teams.

Applying or running commands

Select a command: On any record, use the Slash Command button or just type / in the comment rich-text editor in the internal or external discussion area to open the command selection menu. Based on what you type after /, the command selection menu automatically shows the relevant items. You can navigate through this list with your keyboard up and down arrows to preview what each command does, then select a specific command to run.
Customize before sending: Edit the command-generated content to ensure it suits the specific context of the ticket. Placeholder variables in the response that could not be auto-filled for some reason will show up distinctly to catch your attention so that you can fill it out manually and send the correctly formatted response.

Access control

By default, only admins can create, update, delete, and view all commands in the workspace. Other user groups can be given access to create, update, read, or delete commands by assigning them custom roles through access control mechanisms.

Users who are members of groups specified in the Available to field for an individual command will, by default, have privileges to view and use that command.

Best practices

Start by creating a few essential commands and gradually expand your collection based on the most frequent types of queries you receive and the tasks you perform. Remember, the goal is to make your support process as streamlined and effective as possible, benefiting both your team and your customers.
To facilitate quick discovery of commands while applying, names should be easy to remember and follow a common structure for easy categorization and search. If you have common themes or categories, the exact convention is up to you to standardize for your teams.

One possible convention is Category-Subcategory-Specific command subject. For example:
- Rerouting-Reroute to payments-Refund
- Rerouting-Reroute to payments-Payment failure
- Rerouting-Reroute to Sales