Looking for app for sending canned email for orders

[aaron-sw]

Hi,

I am looking for suggestions for an app for our customer support staff to be able to send canned responses to common order issues when they send an email through Shopify. (Payment issues, out of stock, delayed shipments, etc.) So far all I have found are marketing apps which is not what I am looking for.

Right now we are doing this by simply copy/pasting the canned response into the Custom Message box each time in the built in Shopify Contact Customer form. It would be better if this dialog had a drop down where the template/canned response can be chosen from.

The email we send also needs to be noted in the order timeline so we can track communications with the customer.

Any suggestions on apps that might fill this role would be appreciated.

[PaulNewton · Accepted solution]

Be sure to contact support directly, and let them know if you want this as feature request.

The keyword for this is: transactional email  ; as opposed to marketing emails.

You probably need a CRM with email flowing through that as it can solve a lot of headaches longterm.

This exact mix of wants is a unicorn app, for instance apps cannot modify the admins customer contact form, that's something that would require browser userscripts or a browser addon/extension.

You'd probably have to build something custom to get close, or hobble it together from the below ingredients:

Some email services have some sort of boilerplate/template functionality if customers are emailing your inbox (e.g. gmail).

Or maybe shopify inbox which has quick replies

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/inbox/configure-inbox/quick-replies 

If there's a lot of copy&pasting going on look into either clipboard/clipboard-sharing apps, or text-snippet apps/services.

Most apps that add an entry to the admin actions may only show a generic entry i.e. "Reply to customer in App X", so staff would go to the customer admin find the customer then pick the apps action , navigate to the app, wait for app to load , then navigate to and pick the response boilerplate to send.

 So that's something to watch out for as a subfeature that it is somehow a 1-2 click action and not more actions than if you have just copied & pasted.

There are automation apps like firepush, mesa,mechanic, to build workflows like this.

Like with mechanic you'd script some transactional emails , then in the customer admin choose the admin-action-link "send to mechanic"; Or build a custom dashboard to trigger workflows as runlinks probably as bookmarklets or browser extensions.

https://learn.mechanic.dev/core/shopify/admin-action-links 

Another approach is while there's no timeline is to poll* customers data and check for new timeline comments, so staff could add a comment "send out of stock email" and an automation app reads that to trigger that specific email.

https://learn.mechanic.dev/faq/whats-possible-with-timeline-comments#whats-possible 

There's also depending on your setup using an automation service to reply automatically based on keywords.

Good Hunting.

*Currently timelines do not create api events or have webhooks , so data just have to be constantly checked if you try to react to timelines.