Every email arrives with a reply already written
The Support Agent drafts a reply to each email before anyone opens it. Your team sends it, fixes it or bins it, and once you trust it, lets it send on its own.
To Dan Okafor · from support@acme.com
Hi Dan,
Thanks for sending the agreement. You’re right, section 4.2 caps the account at 25 seats. I’ve asked billing to credit the 15 extra seats on the Q2 invoice; you’ll see the adjusted invoice within two business days.
Sorry for the back-and-forth.
Grace
Most of the time an email reply takes isn't spent writing. It goes on reading back through the thread, opening the attachment, checking the customer's plan, finding the article that answers it, and remembering how you handled the last one like it. The writing is the couple of minutes at the end.
The Support Agent does that part before anyone on your team opens the conversation. Every email that comes in gets a draft reply, written from your docs and what you know about the customer. Your team reads it, fixes what needs fixing, and sends it.1
Why email, and why drafts
People on chat are waiting, so on chat the Support Agent answers straight away. Email is different. Nobody expects a reply in eight seconds, and an email carries more weight. It's longer, it's often about money or a contract, and it sits in someone's inbox waiting to be forwarded to their boss.
That makes email the right place for drafts. The Support Agent does the slow part, a person checks the result, and the customer gets a reply that is both quick and reviewed.
What goes into a draft
A draft is written from the same things the Support Agent answers from on chat, and nothing else:
- The email itself, the thread before it, and any attachments.
- Your knowledge base: published help articles and the files you've uploaded.
- Playbooks for situations like refunds or contract disputes.
- Connector tools you've opened to customers, like looking up a subscription in Stripe.
- Memory about the person and their company.
If the answer isn't clearly in there, it doesn't write a confident-sounding guess for you to catch. It hands the conversation to your team with a note on why.2
Sending one takes a click
Open a conversation with a draft and the draft is already in the reply box, with the send button turned purple. Send it as it is, change a sentence and send that, or clear the box to throw it away. Conversations with a draft waiting collect in their own inbox view, Ready to send, so the morning's email becomes a list to read and send.
If a draft misses the point, type /draft and the Support Agent writes a
fresh one.
Start with drafts, then let go
Every workspace starts on drafts, but you don't have to stay there. After a few weeks you'll have a feel for how often drafts go out untouched. When it's most of them, there are two more settings to try.
We were billed for 40 seats on the Q2 invoice, but our agreement caps us at 25. Copy attached. Can you fix this?
agreement.pdfIn Ready to send · the draft is already in the reply box
Hi Dan, thanks for sending the agreement. You’re right, section 4.2 caps the account at 25 seats. I’ve asked billing to credit the 15 extra seats on the Q2 invoice…
- Who presses send
- A teammate, every time.
- Good for
- Your first weeks, and inboxes where every word matters.
Send with a delay is the halfway house. The Support Agent writes its draft, starts a countdown, five minutes unless you change it, and sends the draft when the countdown runs out. Until then, anyone on your team can send it early, take it over to edit, or stop it. If the customer writes again first, the Support Agent rewrites the draft to answer both messages and the countdown starts over.
Send the reply takes away the last step. The Support Agent answers by email as soon as its reply is ready, the way it does on chat. It still hands over when it doesn't know.3
Reference
Set it up
Drafts are on in every new workspace. A routing rule called Email · Support Agent drafts a reply gives incoming email to the Support Agent, and it drafts a reply to each one.
To change what it does, open Agents → Support Agent → Channels, then the Email row.
| Setting | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Replies to customers | Draft a reply, Send the reply or Send with a delay. | Draft a reply |
| Send after | How long a draft waits before it sends, from 1 minute to 2 hours. Only with Send with a delay. | 5 minutes |
| Email switch | Off keeps the Support Agent out of email completely. | On |
Work through drafts
- Ready to send in the inbox lists the email conversations with a draft waiting.
- Open one and the draft is already in the reply box. Send Support Agent's draft sends it as it is. Change it and the button reads Send edited draft. Clear the box to discard the draft.
- Type
/draftto ask for a fresh draft. This works in email conversations only.
Send with a delay
- The delay starts when the draft is ready, not when the email arrived.
- The draft shows above the reply box with a countdown: Draft reply · sends in 4 min. In the last minute it counts down in seconds.
- When it reaches zero, the Support Agent sends the draft. The conversation stays with the Support Agent.
While the countdown runs, anyone on your team can:
- Send now to send the draft straight away.
- Edit to take the conversation over. The draft moves into your reply box, and nothing sends until you send it.
- Don't send to stop the countdown. The draft stays in the conversation until a teammate edits and sends it.
The countdown also stops, and the draft waits for a teammate, when:
- a teammate takes the conversation over, or the Support Agent hands it to your team;
- someone resolves or snoozes the conversation;
- you switch Replies to customers to another option, or turn the Support Agent off for email.
Good to know
- If the customer writes again before the draft goes, the Support Agent writes a new draft that answers both messages, and the countdown starts again.
- If a teammate already has the conversation when the email arrives, the draft is an ordinary draft for them, with no countdown.
- Changing Send after applies to new drafts. A draft already counting down keeps its time.
- Drafts counting down are listed under Scheduled in the inbox.
- If the email can't go out when it's due, Buzzer tries again shortly and the countdown reads sending…. If it still can't send, the conversation moves to Failed to send.
Step in
While the Support Agent has a conversation, the reply box shows Support Agent is handling this conversation with two buttons:
- Add note leaves an internal note. The Support Agent stays in charge.
- Step in assigns the conversation to you and gives you the composer. The Support Agent stops replying.
Assigning the conversation to any teammate also takes it off the Support Agent.
Questions
Related
Footnotes
-
Out of the box, nothing reaches a customer by email until a person presses send. Letting the Support Agent send on its own is a setting you turn on, and you can turn it off again. ↩
-
The customer doesn't see any of that. If the Support Agent hasn't replied yet, it says nothing, and a teammate simply replies. ↩
-
The setting is for email only. What the Support Agent does on chat is decided by routing and by who answers each widget. ↩