Respond faster with Snippets

Use Snippets in your customer responses to deliver fast, personal and consistent customer care.

This help file will guide you through creating snippets to personalize your responses to customers.

Before you start

You’ll need to have access to Snippets in your Settings in order to view, create and edit snippets. If you don’t have access, you can request it from an Admin user within your business.

01 What are Snippets?

Snippets are a handy shortcut for including customer/order information or even common phrases in the messages that you send to customers.

Instead of having to look up information like the order number, expected delivery date, or customer’s first name, you can simply select the appropriate snippet from a list and eDesk will insert the information into the message for you. For example, select #customer_first_name# to insert the customer’s name into a salutation. We call these customer snippets.

Note: Due to Amazon restrictions, some Customer snippets will not populate customer information for Amazon channels.
You can also use snippets to pull in the replacement text, for example, select #thanks# to insert “Thank you for contacting xSellco”, which saves on a lot of typing and ensures that your messages have a consistent tone and phrasing. We call these text snippets.
You can also use snippets to share a link on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. We call these sharing snippets.

Pro-Tip: eDesk provides a set of customer snippets (listed here), but you can also create text or sharing snippets for everybody in your company, or just for your own use.

02 How to use Snippets

You can use snippets directly when writing a message in Mailbox, or include them in templates (click here for instructions).

In Mailbox, type # into the Message field to show a list of all snippets available to you, or you can type # followed by some or all of the snippet's name and the list will update to show the matching snippets as you type, e.g., #consumer. Click a snippet in the list to insert the appropriate value into the Message field.

03 Company vs Personal Snippets permissions

Company snippets are snippets that are available in the snippets listing for everybody in your company. They include all of the customer snippets that are provided by eDesk, and also any text or sharing snippets that have been created by yourself or one of your teammates, and which have been flagged up as a Company snippet.
Personal snippets are snippets that are available in the snippets listing only for the user that created them. They are either text or sharing snippets that have been created by that user, and which have not been flagged up as a company snippet.

The next section describes how to flag a text or sharing snippet as a company snippet, and make it available for use by everybody in your company.

04 Creating Text or Sharing Snippets

Go to Settings → Smart Tools → Snippets and click +Add Snippet (or click the ellipsis … to create a snippet from one of our samples).
Click the Company Snippets checkbox if you want to make the snippet available to all the users in your company.
Select one of the following from the Type menu:
- Text to insert replacement text into the message.
- Share on… to share on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Linked In.
Enter a unique name into the Snippet Name field (alphanumeric characters only).
The Share Link field is displayed only if you have selected Share on Facebook, Google+ or Linked In from the Type menu. Enter the link to the page you wish to share.
Enter replacement text, hyperlinks and images into the Replacement text field. This is what will be inserted into the Message field in the Mailbox when this snippet is selected from the snippets list.
Pro-tip: You can also include Customer snippets in a Text snippet by including the snippet surrounded by hashtags, e.g., “Dear #customer_firstname#, We’re sorry to hear there's a problem with your order.”
Click Create Snippet.
If you have selected the Company Snippets checkbox (step 2), the new snippet is listed in the Company Snippets tab in Settings → Smart Tools → Snippets, and will appear in the snippets list when any user in your company enters # into the Message field in your Mailbox. If you left the Company Snippets checkbox unticked, the new snippet is listed in the My Snippets tab and will appear in your own snippets list only.

05 Deleting Snippets

Go to Settings > Smart Tools > Snippets and view the list of snippets in the My Snippets or Company Snippets tab.
Click the ellipsis ... in the row for the snippet, to show a menu.
In the menu, click Delete.

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