By Rachel Andrew CHAPTER 11and try out new features. Knowing that this occurs means that we don’t
plan to do anything that would make it difficult to do support in the few
days after a release.
CanneD ReSPonSeS
A canned response is a standard reply to a standard question, that can be
quickly sent when that question is asked. We find these very useful for
common situations where
a customer has not given
us enough information
at first to be able to help
them. For example, Perch
has a diagnostic report
available in the software,
and we ask that customers
requesting support paste
this into their ticket as
it gives us a lot of information about the particular environment that our
product is running in. If the customer has not added that information we
can, with one click, send out a response asking for it.
Some product owners and those providing support worry that
canned responses might remove the personal touch. Josh Emerson from
Clearleft voiced this concern saying:
I spend a lot of my time replying to customers with very similar solutions
[...] I often consider automating my customer response in some way, but I’m
concerned that by offering a more automated solution, the quality of our
response would suffer. I hate to contact a company and get a generic response
that does not answer my question. I especially hate it when the email pretends
to come from a real person.Choosing a canned response in HelpSpot.