With shortcuts, you can save typing time by inserting common phrases with just a few keys. For example, you might want to create a shortcut that says, "Hi there, how may I assist you today?" You can also use placeholders to pull in visitor-specific and chat session–specific information.
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About shortcuts
You can create up to 15,000 shortcuts in your account.
There are three types of shortcuts available:Personal,shared global, andshared department:
- Personal shortcuts, which can be created by an agent or administrator for their own use.
- Shared shortcuts, which can be created only by an administrator, and can be shared among multiple users. There are two kinds of shared shortcuts:
- Department shortcuts, available to agents in specific departments. A single department shortcut can be used by multiple departments. SeeCreating shortcutsfor more information.Department shortcuts are not available on all plans.
- Global shortcuts, available to all agents, regardless of their department affiliation..
You select the type of shortcut during its creation. Depending on your permissions, you can change the shortcut type by reassigning it. See重新分配ing shortcutsfor more information.
Administrators can restrict the permissions available to agents:
- All shortcuts:Can add and edit personal, department, and global shortcuts.
- Department: Can add and edit personal and department shortcuts.
- Personal: Can add and edit personal shortcuts.
- None: Unable to add or edit any shortcuts.
These permissions are applied to a user via their Chat role, and are configured on each role's edit page, in the Shortcuts section:
For information on these and other permissions, seeCreating custom roles and assigning users.
Creating shortcuts
Shortcuts are created on the Shortcuts settings page, which is accesed from the Chat dashboard.
To create a shortcut
- From the Chat dashboard, selectSettings > Shortcuts.
- ClickAdd Shortcutto open the shortcut creation page:
- In theShortcutfield, enter the abbreviated text you want to use as your shortcut.Note:Shortcut names cannot contain the following characters: /, \ , $.
- Use theAvailable fordrop-down to select the shortcut type you want to create. SeeAbout shortcutsfor information on shortcut types:
- SelectAll Agentsto create a shared global shortcut.
- SelectAgents in Department(s)to create a shared department shortcut.
- SelectMe onlyto create a personal shortcut.
- If you selectedAgents in Departmentsin the previous step, enter the names of the department(s) you want to share the shortcut with into theRequiredfield.
- In theMessagefield, enter the complete phrase or question the shortcut should insert.
To pull in visitor-specific details, you can click the插入占位符link to display a list of available placeholders. Click on the placeholder you want to use to insert it into the message body.
- (Optional) If your shortcut is for a question with a discrete list of answers, clickAdd Optionto add one or more Options to enter answers visitors should select from, such as in the example below:
- (Optional) If needed, click in theTagsfield to add a tag to a chat when this shortcut is used.
- ClickCreate Shortcutto finish.
Editing, deleting, and cloning shortcuts
You can edit existing shortcuts, delete unneeded shortcuts, or clone a shortcut to copy its content and modify it.
To edit an existing shortcut
- From the Chat dashboard, selectSettings > Shortcuts.
- Click on the row of any shortcut to edit it.
- Update the information as needed, then clickSave Changes.
To delete an existing shortcut
- From the dashboard, selectSettings > Shortcuts
- Click on the row of any shortcut to select it.
- Use theActionsdrop-down menu at the top of the page to select删除.
The shortcut is removed from the list.
To clone an existing shortcut
- From the dashboard, selectSettings > Shortcuts
- Click on the row of any shortcut to select it.
- Use theActionsdrop-down menu at the top of the page to selectClone.
- Update the information as needed,making sure to give the shortcut a new name.
- ClickCreate Shortcut.
重新分配ing shortcuts
Admins and agents can change a shortcut’s type by reassigning them. Shortcuts can be reassigned individually, or in bulk.
To reassign shortcuts
- From the dashboard, selectSettings > Shortcuts.
- Select one or more shortcuts. You can select all shortcuts on the list by clicking the checkbox at the top of the list.
- Click theActionsdrop-down menu, then select重新分配.
- Select the shortcut type you want to apply:
- SelectAll Agentsto create a shared global shortcut.
- SelectAgents in Department(s)to create a shared department shortcut, if available.
- SelectMe onlyto create a personal shortcut, if available.
- If you selectedAgents in Departments, enter the names of the department(s) you want to share the shortcut with.
- ClickSetto save the new assigned type.
Using shortcuts in chats
Shortcuts are entered into a chat by the agent, who either begins typing the abbreviated shortcut text, or entering a slash. If the agent enters only a slash (/), the first 10 shortcuts appear. You can filter the displayed shortcuts by typing in more of the shortcut name.
Agents and admins will see:
- Their personal shortcuts
- Department shortcuts shared with the departments they belong to
- Global shortcuts
To use a shortcut in a chat
- In a chat, start typing a shortcut, or type a slash (/) to view all shortcuts. The matching shortcut options appear, like in the example below:
Personal and department shortcuts are labeled as such.
- Highlight the shortcut you want to insert either by clicking it or by pressing the down arrow and thenEnter.
- The complete shortcut appears. If your shortcut includes options, they appear with radio buttons when you send the chat.
20 Comments
And what about inserting clickable links in the Shortcuts?
Hi Riko!
I'm afraid to say that we currently don't support the use of any "clickable links" or hyperlinks in the Chat Shortcuts. Currently, you can only add the URL of the webpage in the Shortcuts.
Best,
Customer Advocacy Team
Please try to copy/paste url like this on mobile device while chatting with customer agents (even here the link is clickable.....in the chat - it is not!):
https://www.chaotksut.com/wertwerferfjeqrjer//34563456....34563456.634534634345643563456645///32456/ertyertertgertgerter/ertherthetrhethethethr
What a nonsense guys! It should be the first thing in the service software that supports hyperlinks! I do not really get this why would you ignore this for almost 4 years when this issue was raised before....
Hi Riko!
We truly regret if you felt that the feedback you raised before isn't valued by us. Please accept our apology if the feature you're looking for isn't available yet, as our developers are still working as much as they could to attend to all of our customer's needs. But we hear you and we truly value the feedback y'all submit to us, as this helps us improve the service/product that we offer.
Best,
Customer Advocacy Team
I want to set up automatic chat triggers and send a message to clients. Although automatic translation works for all other messages, the trigger message sent is always in German. Also, dynamic content and shortcuts do not work to translate the message either to German or English. Is there a possibility to translate the trigger messages?
Hello Robert,
At the moment Supporting dynamic content in triggers is not a priority for the team right now. The best way to handle your use case is copy the trigger and adjust the text for each language.
如果你想触发器在浏览器上loc基地ale over the country, you will need to look into using custom code on your website to apply a tag of the locale detected by your visitors browser.
There is a Community article regarding this below, please feel free to contribute as our product team does constantly monitor these posts:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360029392374
Have a great day!
Jason Schaeffer| Customer Advocate |Support@zendesk.com
Hi,
Is it possible to do this in Zendesk Support?
Thanks,
Tamara
Hi.
After migrating to the agent workspace, the shortcuts for chat is only available to start with input "/". May I know if it is possible to get the same approach as the classic chat that the shortcuts will shows if agents input the content of the shortcuts? Instead of starting every shortcuts with a "/"?
Hello. I need to download ALL quick response templates (shortcuts) fromhttps://regru.zendesk.com/chat/agent#shortcuts.
How to do it?
Tamara Yulevich,
是的,你可以e it in Agent workspace. Please refer toServing chats in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
Christy Vance,
It's only possible to use shortcut in Agent Workspace if you use the "/" key.
Анастасия Куприянова,
You can use theChat APIto list down all the shortcuts you have and export it afterwards.
Dane
Thanks, but my company doesn't use "chats". when I enter chats I get this message: "Zendesk Chat is not enabled for you". Is there a way to do it without using chats? or to bypass this permission?
Thanks.
Tamara Yulevich,
As it turns out, shortcuts are only available for Chat and Messaging Channel. This can only be utilized in Support if Agent Workspace is enabled and you have access to Chat.
What I can recommend is to utilizeMacroinstead.
As admin, is it possible to see personal macros/shortcuts created by agents?
As it turns out, there's no native feature for you to extract personal macros/shortcuts of your agents. However, you can utilizeChat shortcuts APIandMacro APIto extract such data.
Just a heads up regarding Macro APIs, you can only extract shared and personal macros of the current user you are using to make the API call. To extract macros of other users, you will need to use anAPI tokenin place of each user's password to access their own personal macro.
Hope this helps!
有可能有一个默认退回温馨的吗eholders? I don't want my shortcuts to say "Hi Visitor 12345678" when they haven't filled out the form for some reason
You can include a default value in the placeholder. This value is used if the user's first name can't be resolved.
For example, if your automatic response is configured like this:
Hi, {{firstName || there}}, Thanks for reaching out. An agent will be with youPlease notice that it works via Bot settings. Using the same way can configure greeting messages from your bot Settings -> Standard responses. For more information please follow -Sending automatic responses to social messages
Viktor Osetrov, your directions are for answer bots. This article is about live chat shortcuts; however I tried anyway:
Hi {{visitor_name||there}}!
My name is {{agent_name}}. Nice to e-meet you
and it did not work.
Thanks a lot for your testing,
Yes, you are right - it doesn't work from the chat shortcuts area because of the different variables there between agent workspaces.
However, it works at thenew agent workspaceif you would like to upgrade Standard Responses. You can use the condition 'OR' as a sign `||`
I have testedgreeting messagesvia Messaging using Web Widget (Classic) channel. It works.
I'm having trouble with shortcuts that have radio button options within the shortcut. Our organization serves Chats through ZenDesk Support and when attempting to use shortcuts, anything with pickable options will not display.
Shortcut example:
List of available shortcuts example:
as you can see there is no option to pick the shortcut.
Can you please help me understand how to ensure these shortcuts can be used. This is a critical tool for us to efficiently serve customers.
Thanks
As it turns out, chat shortcut "Options" is one of the Chat limitations in Zendesk Support - Agent Workspace. This is not supported yet. You can also see this outlined in our article:Limitations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace
As of the moment, you can use regular shortcuts like the example below:
I agree with you that is it a good feature to have. Rest assured that I will pass this along as feedback to our team who's continuously working to improve Zendesk features. I also highly suggest that you share this as a feature request with your use-case in ourCommunity Forum. Our Product Managers are constantly reviewing suggestions submitted in our forum to be considered in our future updates.
I hope this answer your question.
Pleasesign into leave a comment.