Tips for Quick Chat Support: Texter App vs Chat Macros

When you make use of Userlike Live Chat you are probably familiar with Chat Macros. Chat macros are predefined text elements that can be summoned through short key combinations, making chat support a lot more efficient, easy and fun.

Acknowledging that chat macros are awesome and very useful, I'd like to introduce you to an alternative outside solution that could be helpful for your chat operations: text expansion apps. Why would I want to do that? Because I think the Texter App can be useful for a different type of communication than Chat Macros.

The difference between Chat Macros and text extension apps is that the latter are specific to a computer, so to a certain operator. An operator can thus download the texter app and create any predefined messages he finds useful, because the messages won’t appear in the Userlike Chat Macro reservoir and thus won’t create a chaos. With a Texter app, any key combination can be turned into a predefined text, you are not committed to the standard $macro format. Myself I use recognisable letters followed by a dot, e.g. “YW.” for "You're welcome :)"

The main strength of the good old Userlike Chat Macros is that they can be used to communicate company-specific information in a standardised manner. For example it is useful to set up Chat Macros for Product Descriptions, Use Guides, Company Policies, Regulations, etc.

They can be set up by one knowledgeable person and are afterwards available for all operators. Because of this they are a great way to reduce human error in communication. If every operator was to repeat your company policies by itself, probably there'd be plenty of cases where a vital piece of information wasn’t communicated correctly, leading to customer complaints, or worse.

One downside of Chat Macros is that they're not so flexible. The creation of macros should be done by one or a few persons to prevent chaos in your macro overview. Also, an operator cannot just create a macro out of every sentence he notices himself using a lot; he cannot put his own style into it. And that is exactly what a text extension app does allow you to do.

I use both Chat Macros and a Texter App and I’ve noticed that handling the chat becomes a lot easier. Where I use Chat Macros for company-specific information, as described above, I use the Texter App for more personal conversational sentences. Below a couple of good use cases for the Texter App:

Standard Greetings and Goodbyes: “Hi there how are you?” “OK, have a nice day!” Standard Interferences: “Let me check that for you”, “One second please…”, “You're welcome :)”, “I don’t understand your question”, etc. Standard abbreviations: “I'll be right back" (brb.), “Oh my god”(omg.), “etcetera”(etc.) Listening Indicators: “aha I see…” “I understand…” “OK, continue…” “Oh really? Tell me more…”

Download Suggestions:

For Mac we recommend aText

For Windows we recommend PhraseExpress

Let us know whether Texter Apps are of use to you!