Customer service

Snabbsvar: reply templates that fill themselves in

Own project · 2 min read · Otto Boström

Snabbsvar is a tool for anyone who answers the same questions many times a day. I built it from my own years in customer service at Elgiganten, where a large part of the day went to finding an old reply, pasting it in and changing the name, order number and date by hand.

The problem

Most customer service teams already have reply templates. They live in a document, in a chat tool or in someone's notes. What takes time is everything around them: finding the right template, filling in the customer's details in three places and working out which date "within 14 days" actually is. Each of those steps is small, but it is repeated hundreds of times a week, and that is where the mistakes creep in.

The solution

• Search instead of looking. Type a couple of letters and the right template comes up.
• Fields that are filled in once. The customer's name and order number are typed once per case and land in every template used in that case.
• Dates that are worked out. A template can contain "today plus 14 days", and the tool writes the right date.
• A keyboard shortcut for copying. The reply is then pasted into the system you already use.
• A counter that shows how much time the templates have saved during the day.

Built to work without an IT project

Snabbsvar sits beside your usual case system in a tab of its own. It needs no installation and no connection to other systems, so a team can try it the same day. Templates and settings are saved in the browser, and the customer's details are never saved.

Where it stands today

Snabbsvar is a working prototype that I use to show what a narrowly scoped tool can do. It has not been put into use at any client yet, so I have no measurements from a real customer service team to show. The next step is shared templates for a whole team.

For your customer service

The same idea can be adapted to your ten or twenty most common replies, your rules for returns and deliveries and your way of writing. It is a typical quick tool: narrow in scope, ready in days and easy to try for a week before you decide.