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Messaging Guide for Customer Support
Messaging Guide for Customer Support

Give your customers the quality care they deserve, quickly.

Josh avatar
Written by Josh
Updated over a week ago

Your customers want personalized and human interactions and they want it in real-time.

Nobody wants a robotic, outsourced tool to answer their questions these days. Instead, the shift toward conversational messaging is here to stay - especially for business messaging.

That's why customer support is easier to manage when it's done over texting. Problem is, how do you text your customers in a professional way?

The last thing you want is all your employees messaging people off their personal cell phone numbers...

Right?

This is where MessageDesk comes in. Our shared inbox enables your team to text back and forth with customers easily all from your business phone line.

This part of a multi-part series relating to the business flywheel pictured above. This article plays into the "Earn Reviews, Create referrals" and "Create & Keep Customers" sections above.

In this article, I'll go over 3 ways MessageDesk levels up your customer support process and makes your customers happy campers.

Table of Contents:


Unify Your Team into a Single Inbox

With a single shared inbox, your team can collaborate on any customer request within seconds. Making it easy to have fast response times while preventing conversations from slipping between the cracks.

Specifically, here are 3 reasons why MessageDesk makes it easy to manage customer support:

  1. Templates: quickly insert pre-saved responses into any conversation (templates are shared with your team)

    1. Get free templates from our website here

  2. Team Inbox: You and your team see the same conversations in real-time. Making it easy for someone to respond as soon as possible

  3. Conversation Statuses: Organize your conversations by "New", "Waiting", and "Replied" so you never forget a conversation

On top of sorting conversations by status, you can also assign conversations to specific people on your team.

This way when a conversation graduates from a "team" message to a "personal" message you can easily hand it off to the right person on your staff.

The ultimate goal of the Inbox is to get to what we call Inbox-0. This is where you have 0 open conversations in your inbox and signals to your team that no contact is waiting for a response currently.

To achieve Inbox-0, you just have to close conversations. When a conversation is "Closed" it gets removed from the inbox for you and the rest of your team.

Marking a conversation as "Closed" is how you signal to everyone that the conversation has ended or been resolved.

But don't worry, "Closed" doesn't mean "deleted". You can always go back to a Closed conversation by changing your Inbox filter.


Provide Priority Support with Inbox Views

In the section above, we covered how to unify your team into a single inbox.

Within a single inbox though you may need to further organize your contacts into different "views" or "groups". This way you can prioritize the right customer at the right time, or point the right team to the right set of customers.

You can create custom views in your MessageDesk inbox by following the step-by-step guide here.

When clicking into a "view" you'll filter your inbox down to just the conversations with customers who are in that view. Making it easy to prioritize your conversations at scale and while guaranteeing your best customers get priority support.

Once you have your different views set up, you can easily move contacts in and out of a view by interacting with them in the Inbox.

Automate Customer Service with Autoresponders πŸ“¬


For certain situations, you may want to immediately reply to your customers rather than waiting for your team to respond manually.

Here are a few common examples of when you may prefer automation:

With MessageDesk, you can automate replies for all the above.


Office Hours

First, I'll cover office hours. With MessageDesk you can set up your office hours to match your business's normal operating schedule.

If a customer messages outside of this window, the system will automatically respond on your behalf

Website Support

Most of the time, people go to a business's website right before they ask the support team a question.

They'll try to find an answer on their own first, but if they can't find it they'll reach out soon after.

And it's likely that a majority of your website traffic is asking similar questions too.


πŸ’œ With MessageDesk, you can start conversations from your website using our chatbot. learn more here. πŸ’œ


To avoid your staff from being bombarded with these frequent questions you can set up keyword automation in MessageDesk. This will help alleviate these support requests before they reach your staff.

For example, you can put keywords on your website to prompt visitors to reply via text before reaching out directly to your team. In the example below, visitors just have to text us "Support" to trigger an automated response.

For more advanced automation, you can also explore setting up a text-tree. This is where you link multiple keyword automations together to create a campaign like an experience:

Here's what it would look like in a Customer Service setting in a flow chart:

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