Your sales and support teams will often find themselves repeating actions you do from the Inbox, like assigning conversations after triage, tagging a certain way, or sending a response and snoozing. Macros let you optimize these actions into a single click, and still give you the flexibility to tweak them for a personal experience.
How to create a macro
From the Inbox
Use ⌘/Ctrl K or the action icon in the composer and search for Create new macro.
Search Manage macros here for a shortcut to the macros Settings page.
First, give your macro a title. This is the number one way your team will search for, share and use macros, so make it something clear and concise:
Then enter the content to include when you use this macro. This could be used when replying to a customer, or included in an internal note for a teammate.
Content can include articles, emoji, GIFs, images, or attachments:
Including content is entirely optional. Macros can apply actions without a reply or note.
Now it’s time to choose the actions your macro should apply to the conversation, click + Add actions to begin:
This step is also optional, macros can just be content.
Actions that can be added to a Macro are:
Assign conversation to team
Assign conversation to teammate
Add tag to conversation — Apply one or more tags to the first conversation part.
Snooze conversation — After performing any other actions (can’t be used with the close action).
Close conversation — After performing any other actions (can’t be used with the snooze action).
Change conversation priority
Custom Action — using API to fetch data or perform actions in external systems via API
In this example, we send a response, tag the conversation, mark it as priority and assign it to the sales team:
For more example macros, and some best practice tips check out this article.
Now select how this macro can be used for starting conversations, replying, or just adding notes.
Finally, choose if the macro should be available for everyone in your workspace, or for certain teams, or only for yourself.
We recommend limiting the number of macros available for each team in your workspace so it’s easier to find and use them.
Even if limited to specific teams, anyone with permission to edit macros will still be able to see and edit this in the settings.
Then save the macro and you’re done!
Keep your macro private
You can create macros for your own personal use. These won’t be visible to anyone else in your workspace Settings or the Inbox.
When composing your macro, just select Myself only under Available for.
From Settings
Creating a macro from the settings page follows the same steps as above, but here you can also search, filter and edit your existing macros.
Go to Settings > Help Desk > Macros, and click + New macro.
Or, to edit an existing macro, just select it from the list on the left, and you can start editing directly.
Search and filter your macros
By default you’ll see all your workspace’s macros in the list on the left. This can be filtered by the different teams that have access like this:
Or, you can search macros based on their title.
The search will not find content in the body of your macros.
You can even combine search and a filter. This example shows all macros from the Support Engineering team, that contain the word “Bug”:
Searches are not case sensitive, but they do use an exact string match, so if you’re using multiple words they must be found in the same order in the macro. 👌
See how often a macro is used
From the macro settings page, you can see how many times a macro has been used in the last 30 days:
This makes it easy to see which macros are being used most often, and can offer insight into how your team are handling conversations.
Export macros usage
Easily audit your macros based on how often they're used and monitor if teammates are using them correctly with a CSV export.
Simply go to the macros settings page and click Export on the top right:
The teammate requires the following permissions to export macro data: Can manage shared macros, Can access reports, and Can export CSV
This will generate and automatically download a CSV file to your device with the following fields:
Name - Title of the macro.
Visibility - Who can see this macro in the Inbox.
Created at - When the macro was first created.
Owner - Which teammate created the macro.
Updated at - When the macro was last updated.
Type - Where this macro is used (for starting conversations, replying or notes).
Date - Number of times the macro was inserted on this date.
Note: Generating the CSV can take several seconds (up to about 30 seconds for +10K macros).
How to export macros
We don't currently have a way to export Macro content directly from the platform.
That being said, you can view all of your workspace's macros by going the following URL: https://app.intercom.com/ember/saved_replies.json?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID
(just replace YOUR_APP_ID with the appropriate value of your workspace)
Note: To find your app ID you can go to the URL bar in Intercom and find the values between the forward slash -- I'll show an example below:
Steps:
In first tab go to https://app.intercom.com/ember/saved_replies.json?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID > Command+A to select all the JSON text > Command+C to Copy selected text.
In another tab to go https://www.jsonquerytool.com/ > Use Command+A again to select all the text in the Input section > Delete to clear the text > Command+V to paste in the JSON text from the previous step.
In the Query section, delete the example query > Paste in
$.saved_replies[*].blocks[0].textThe contents of each macro are automatically shown in the Output.
The query above doesn't include the name of each Macro so you could use the query $.saved_replies[*] instead which will include the name along with all the other attributes. This should make sifting through the data easier.
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