How to use Live Chat Canned Responses from Microsoft Teams

With Live Chat canned responses and quick shortcut replies, you can answer many live chat questions in just a few clicks.  These canned responses to common questions can be set up right from within your Microsoft Teams Live Chat Settings.  Quickly set up a series of answers to your most common live chat questions and access them from any live chat.  This will impress your customers and save your live chat agents time.

What is a Live Chat Canned Response?

Canned responses are just pre-defined live chat message responses that can be accessed from your shortcuts menu during any live chat.  You can access these from within your Microsoft Teams live chat conversations.  Set up any number of responses that your agents will have quick access to.

Setting up your Canned Responses in Microsoft Teams

To set up your canned responses,  first go to your Live Chat settings within Teams from the left side bar.  If you haven't yet added our Live Chat app to Microsoft Teams, get started here.

Then navigate to the Shortcuts link within your Chat Settings tab.  You can see that we have 2 shortcuts set up in the example below.  You can include links in your shortcuts and even buttons for quick reply options.

Next, choose your shortcut text and the message that will appear when the shortcut is selected.  Typical message shortcuts include introductory greetings and welcome messages, closing messages, and asking visitors for additional information.  You can also point people to particular pages in your website like pricing or product detail pages.

Using Canned Responses from your Live Chat

Now that you've set up a couple canned messages or shortcuts for your live chat, you can use them during any website live chat.  Simply select the list icon from the top right menu from any active chat.  You'll see your list of shortcuts that you can choose.  Once you select a shortcut, the canned response message will be pre-populated into the message area.  Simply click the send icon to send the message as is or you can modify as needed.

The visitor will see the canned response message from their live chat similar to the following example.

Sending Links in your Canned Messages

To send a link to a particular url on your website, simply include the full url in the message response.  Something like the following message response will work:

Here's our pricing: https://www.socialintents.com/#pricing

Sending Button Options in your Canned Messages

You can also send button responses where your message responses will include 1 or more buttons.  To send a button, use code similar to the following.  Just make sure to set a target of '_blank' and apply the class=

<a target="_blank" href="https://www.socialintents.com/signup.do" class="si-button">✨ Start your free trial!</a>

Here's what a shortcut with 2 buttons would look like in a live chat session: