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, and shared 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. See Creating shortcuts for 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 Reassigning shortcuts for 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, see Creating 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, select Settings > Shortcuts.
- Click Add Shortcut to open the shortcut creation page:
- In the Shortcut field, enter the abbreviated text you want to use as your
shortcut. Note: Shortcut names cannot contain the following characters: /, \ , $.
- Use the Available for drop-down to select the shortcut type you want to create.
See About shortcuts for information
on shortcut types:
- Select All Agents to create a shared global shortcut.
- Select Agents in Department(s) to create a shared department shortcut.
- Select Me only to create a personal shortcut.
- If you selected Agents in Departments in the previous step, enter the names of
the department(s) you want to share the shortcut with into the Required
field.
- In the Message field, enter the complete phrase or question the shortcut should
insert.
To pull in visitor-specific details, you can click the Insert placeholder 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, click
Add Option to add one or more Options to enter answers visitors should select
from, such as in the example below:
- (Optional) If needed, click in the Tags field to add a tag to a chat when this shortcut is used.
- Click Create Shortcut to 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, select Settings > Shortcuts.
- Click on the row of any shortcut to edit it.
- Update the information as needed, then click Save Changes.
To delete an existing shortcut
- From the dashboard, select Settings > Shortcuts
- Click on the row of any shortcut to select it.
- Use the Actions drop-down menu at the top of the page to select Delete.
The shortcut is removed from the list.
To clone an existing shortcut
- From the dashboard, select Settings > Shortcuts
- Click on the row of any shortcut to select it.
- Use the Actions drop-down menu at the top of the page to select Clone.
- Update the information as needed, making sure to give the shortcut a new name.
- Click Create Shortcut.
Reassigning 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, select Settings > 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 the Actions drop-down menu, then select Reassign.
- Select the shortcut type you want to apply:
- Select All Agents to create a shared global shortcut.
- Select Agents in Department(s) to create a shared department shortcut, if available.
- Select Me only to create a personal shortcut, if available.
- If you selected Agents in Departments, enter the names of the department(s) you want to share the shortcut with.
- Click Set to 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 then Enter.
- The complete shortcut appears. If your shortcut includes options, they appear with radio
buttons when you send the chat.
27 comments
Riko
And what about inserting clickable links in the Shortcuts?
3
Jim
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
-2
Riko
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....
3
Jim
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
0
Robert Kresser
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?
0
Jason Schaeffer
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.
If you want to base the trigger on the browser locale 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
0
Tamara Yulevich
Hi,
Is it possible to do this in Zendesk Support?
Thanks,
Tamara
0
Christy
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 "/"?
0
Анастасия Куприянова
Hello. I need to download ALL quick response templates (shortcuts) from https://regru.zendesk.com/chat/agent#shortcuts.
How to do it?
0
Dane
Tamara Yulevich,
Yes, you can use it in Agent workspace. Please refer to Serving 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 the Chat API to list down all the shortcuts you have and export it afterwards.
0
Tamara Yulevich
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.
0
Dane
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 utilize Macro instead.
0
Riah Lao
As admin, is it possible to see personal macros/shortcuts created by agents?
0
Dane
As it turns out, there's no native feature for you to extract personal macros/shortcuts of your agents. However, you can utilize Chat shortcuts API and Macro API to 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 an API token in place of each user's password to access their own personal macro.
Hope this helps!
0
TJ
Is it possible to have a default fall-back on placeholders? I don't want my shortcuts to say "Hi Visitor 12345678" when they haven't filled out the form for some reason
0
Viktor Osetrov
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 you
Please 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
0
TJ
@..., your directions are for answer bots. This article is about live chat shortcuts; however I tried anyway:
and it did not work.
0
Viktor Osetrov
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 the new agent workspace if you would like to upgrade Standard Responses. You can use the condition 'OR' as a sign `||`
I have tested greeting messages via Messaging using Web Widget (Classic) channel. It works.
0
Cam
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
0
Gabriel Manlapig
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 our Community 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.
0
Diana Lozano
Hello, for some reason an agent is unable to access any shortcuts they have created or ones that are pre-added. They type "/" but nothing populates, they are enabled for messaging and added to chat but not sure what is causing this.
0
Jhan
0
Vincent Aditya
Hello, I would like to ask. Does the amount of shortcuts you have correlate with the performance of Zendesk on PC? For example if we have thousands of shortcuts does it affect the lagginess or overall performance of Zendesk?
0
Noly Maron Unson
Hi Vincent,
The limit is set to 15000 and Zendesk's side should be able to support this without affecting the performance. Though the more you have will increase the time to load it, it should not be so significant that it greatly affects overall performance.
Hope this helps.
0
Yvan Lin
After we transitioned to messaging, I can no longer call shortcuts that contain options. Is this normal behavior?
0
Audrey Ann Cipriano
Hi Yvan Lin yes, this is an expected behavior as this is currently one of the limitations of Agent Workspace.
Please see our doc here for more info: Limitations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace
0
Sarah
If an employee who created a personal chat shortcut is deactivated (e.g., left the company), will their chat shortcuts still remain in the system?
Additionally, is there a way to download all chat shortcuts for cleanup purposes?
0