Passing to sales
This example is for your support team, when they reach a point in the conversation where sales should take over.
It informs the customer, tags the conversation, marks it as a priority and assigns to the sales team:
Possible variations:
You could have a high and regular priority version so your sales team know which conversations are of highest value.
You could also update a conversation data attribute with a “lead score”
Escalate with a note
When escalating a conversation to another team, it’s a good idea to include a summary of the conversation so far, which steps have been taken, and some possible next moves. This simple template helps your team be consistent with the information they include for the next teammate involved.
Possible variations:
If you have different versions of your product, you could have a template for each, with more specific information included, or even a checklist to follow. See below for an even more detailed example.
Process verification in external system using Custom Actions
You can use Custom Actions to make a request or fetch data from you external system by using API. For example, if you need to run a address verification check, you can add this as a Custom Action to run it automatically when you send a reply.
Alert about an outage
This example is best suited for sending to multiple conversations when you need to alert many customers at once. It informs customers of what’s going on, and directs them to self serve resources to avoid overwhelming your team. It also snoozes and tags the conversations, so they’re out of the way but can easily be found and replied to after the incident (with another bulk macro 😉):
Possible variations:
If you have another way to notify your customers when the outage is over like a banner message, or a status page they can subscribe to, you could close the conversations instead of snoozing them.
Best practices
Use a standard naming convention in your macro titles
To make it easier to memorize macro names and especially to facilitate discovery of new macros, all titles should follow the same structure. The exact format you use is up to you, and could vary from team to team but here’s an example:
Category - Subject of macro (modifiers)
Breaking it down:
If you have projects and tasks in your app, each of these areas would be a “category”.
The specific content or workflow covered in the macro is the “subject”.
Any different versions of the macro can be highlighted with “modifiers”.
So this macro is from the “Projects” category, covers the subject “Time tracking” and applies specifically to people on the “Pro” plan:
This way if you had similar macros for time tracking in the “tasks” area, or for people on the “free” plan, they could be easily identified in the modal when accessing macros from the Help Desk:
Make necessary changes obvious
If you have other areas in your macro content that should be updated manually at the time it’s used, highlight them clearly like this: [FEATURE NAME]
This ensures the message is never sent with the placeholders. 😉
This is particularly helpful for Macros used as internal templates, as you can include guidance for your team on the content to add, or steps to follow before passing.
💡Tip
Need more help? Get support from our Community Forum
Find answers and get help from Intercom Support and Community Experts