Macros and canned responses

Tied has two tools that look similar from across the room and behave completely differently up close.

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Canned responses — a text snippet, nothing else

A canned response is a short code and a block of content. That is the entire model — there is no action, no branching, no side effect. Type / in the composer to search by short code. Results are ranked so a short code that starts with what you typed wins over one that merely contains it, which in turn wins over a match found in the body text — so naming your short codes well pays off immediately in how fast you find them. Use a canned response for wording you retype often, verbatim or close enough that a quick edit after inserting it is fine.

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Macros — a sequence of actions, of which sending a message is only one

A macro runs an ordered list of actions against the current conversation. The available actions are: send a message, add or remove a label, assign or unassign a team, assign an agent, mute, change status, resolve, snooze, change priority, email the transcript, send an attachment, add a private note, or fire a webhook. Macros also have a visibility setting: personal, visible only to the person who built it, or global, visible to the whole account. A macro can also carry its own file attachments, for use with the send-attachment action — useful for a standard PDF or image your team hands out often.

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Picking between them

If the outcome is always the same block of text, reach for a canned response — it is simpler to build and faster to search. If you want more than one thing to happen, or anything beyond sending text at all, that is what a macro is for. A macro can include a send-message action, so it can function as a canned response with side effects, but that flexibility costs setup time you do not need to pay for a plain snippet.

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