We’re Improving our Email Reply Templates

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Greg Meyer

Thursday night, we will be making a few simple changes to our Email Reply templates – these are the templates that style the information you send back to your customers using Assistly.

What’s Changing

We’ve improved the design of these templates and also made changes for better compliance in multiple email clients. To demonstrate what’s changing in our email replay templates, take a look at the same email content, first displayed in the old email template, then in the new template.

An example email, displayed in the old reply template:

Default Email Template, Old Version

The same content, displayed in the new Reply Template:

What You Need to Do

If you haven’t made any changes to your reply template (you’re using the default), you have two choices:

  • You may adopt the new template, in which case you don’t need to do anything – you’ll get the new email reply template on Thursday night this week.
  • You may keep the old design by upgrading your account to use Advanced Templates and create a new reply template before Thursday 11 PM Pacific Time.

If you’re already using a custom email reply template today, nothing will change. Your current design will remain unaffected.

Thank you, and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

  • Anonymous

    This looks a little bit better, but it’s interesting that only a few days ago your blog talked about the confusion caused by emails with headings like “Type your response ABOVE THIS LINE to reply” and suggested that “Just reply to our email” was easier for users to understand. I thought the point made in your earlier blog was right-on, so would have expected Assistly to take its own medicine and remove the un-necessary instruction. As the blog points out, 99+% of people will know to reply to an email, especially one of this nature.

    Further, I don’t see why you need the large Customer and Subject box. Surely the customer knows her/his own name and the Subject is already in the email Subject line. Same goes for the message date and time and even “Greg Meyer replied”. All this information is repetitive and puts a lot of unnecessary text and space before the actual reply. It seems to me that what the customer needs to see is the response we are sending them, so I would expect that to be the very top of the message, followed by the history, and without the clutter of repetitive information.

    Only my 2 cents of course! Thanks for the update and for the fantastic customer support tools provided by Assistly!

    • http://twitter.com/grmeyer Greg Meyer

      Accme -

      Thanks for your feedback! The blog post you refer to was a guest post, not our own opinion, and I will also pass this feedback on to our product team.

      Regards,

      Greg

    • http://about.me/matthew.trifiro Matthew_Trifiro

      Great comments. We are always looking to improve the default templates to reflect best practices, but are also mindful that the defaults we choose must handle the widest possible set of use scenarios. We encourage organizations to customize their email replies, so we offer a low cost ($19/month) upgrade to Email Reply Templates. If you wish to customize or brand your email replies, you may upgrade to Email Reply Templates, which give you full control of the look and feel of your outgoing Agent emails.

      • Luke

        “but are also mindful that the defaults we choose must handle the widest possible set of use scenarios.”

        …Then do not hardwire a reference to our users as being ‘customers’ or any other.

        It’s a semantically cold term and assumes that:

        1. Assistly members refer to their users as ‘customers’
        2. Only customers will contact them – of course in almost any situation this just isn’t the case.

        Never hardcode more into the template than needs to be hardwired.

        Adding a reference term of ‘customers’ (or any other) to the template is just counter intuitive.

        It should be as vanilla as possible, as you rightly say:

        “but are also mindful that the defaults we choose must handle the widest possible set of use scenarios.”

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=588086868 Jan Miczaika

      I second the points above. Customer Name, Date/Time and Subject are redundant and make the emails unneccessarily long – or what is the value in repeating information the email client already shows?

      Not sure this is an improvement…

    • Guest

      +1 I stripped out all the superfluous header info.  I want the customer to receive an email as if it came from my personal inbox not a ticketing system.  A feature /drop down in an agents desktop to swap templates on the fly would be helpful.   

    • Justin

      +1 I stripped out all the superfluous header info.  I want the customer to receive an email as if it came from my personal inbox not a ticketing system.  A feature /drop down in an agents desktop to swap templates on the fly would be helpful.   

  • Stephen Walder

    Yep, like it. Easier on the eye.