Saved Replies and Private Notes

Two features, one problem

The problem is repetition. Saved replies and private notes both live in the Shared Team Inbox, and both exist to remove a different kind of it.

Not the repetition of questions, the Grounded AI Agent handles a lot of that, but the repetition inside the conversations that reach a person. The same explanation typed a fourth time. The same context re-established because whoever handled it last week is not here today.

Saved replies attack the first. Private notes attack the second. Together they are the difference between a team that answers quickly and one that answers eventually.

Saved replies: personal and shared

There are two libraries. Personal replies belong to one person, your own phrasing for the things you specifically handle. Shared replies are managed by site administrators and available to everyone, which is where your team’s official answers live.

You can search by title, shortcut or body, so you can find a reply by what it is called, by the shortcut you assigned it, or by a phrase you remember from inside it. That third one matters more than expected: people rarely remember what they named something six months ago.

Insert, then send

The important design decision: shortcuts insert into your draft. They do not send.

A saved reply that fired automatically would be faster and considerably worse. Almost every canned answer needs a small adjustment, the customer’s name, a detail they already gave, a sentence acknowledging that their situation is slightly unusual. Insert-then-send makes that adjustment the default rather than an extra step you skip when busy.

It also prevents the failure that makes canned responses infamous: the stock answer that does not fit, sent to someone who explicitly said their case was different.

What makes a good shared reply

Three rules cover most of it.

Leave the edges open. A reply that ends mid-thought, ready for a specific detail, gets adapted. One that reads as complete gets sent as-is.

Keep them factual. Save the explanation of your warranty terms, not the pleasantries. Pleasantries are what your team is good at; explanations are what they get tired of retyping.

Prune quarterly. A library of forty replies where eight are current is worse than a library of eight. Delete what has gone stale, because a shared reply is an official answer and an out-of-date one is worse than none.

Private notes: context that stays internal

Private notes carry an author and a timestamp, sit apart from public replies, and are excluded from visitor messages and AI conversation history. Note drafts and reply drafts are kept separate too, which removes the classic disaster of sending an internal comment to a customer.

What to write in one: anything the next person would otherwise have to ask. “Spoke on the phone, they need it before the 12th.” “Second time this has come back, check the earlier job first.” “Partner handles the invoicing, copy them in.”

What not to write: opinions about the customer. A note is a business record with your name and a timestamp on it, and someone else will read it.

The append-only constraint

Notes are append-only in this release. There is no editing, no mentions and no note attachments. If something needs correcting, add another note.

That is a genuine limitation and worth planning around rather than discovering. In practice it pushes people toward shorter, factual notes, which is not the worst outcome, but if your workflow depends on editing internal comments, you should know before you rely on it.

Alerts, briefly

In-app alerts cover relevant visitor messages and assignments, and clicking one opens its conversation. Optional desktop notifications work after you enable them and grant browser permission. Both are delivered while the inbox is open. There is no closed-browser push, no native mobile notification centre, and no synchronised notification history across devices.

Plan your coverage around that rather than assuming a phone will buzz.

Building the first shared library

Ten replies is a good target for a first pass, and you already know what they are.

Look at your sent messages from the last month and find what you have written more than twice. For most businesses that is: opening hours and holiday closures, a coverage or delivery answer, how quoting works, lead times, a “we’ve received this and it’s with the right person” acknowledgement, a payment or invoicing answer, and a polite close for enquiries you cannot help with.

Write each one at about eighty per cent complete, leaving the specifics to be filled in. Give each a short shortcut you will actually remember. Then stop, the library grows naturally from real use, and a large speculative one mostly creates search noise.

Notes as a handover tool

The highest-value private notes are the ones written by someone about to be unavailable.

Before a day off, a short note on each open conversation (what has happened, what is expected next, who else knows) turns an absence into a handover. Without it, everything that person was carrying quietly stalls until they are back.

Because notes are append-only, a conversation naturally accumulates a chronological record with names and timestamps against each entry. That turns out to be exactly the format you want when reconstructing what happened on a job six months later, which is a use nobody plans for and everyone eventually needs.

Read next: how the shared inbox routes and assigns conversations, or shared team inbox vs a shared email address.