I try — I really do — to reply to every email personally addressed to me, but there’s only so much time I can spend dealing with my inbox each day. Gmail’s canned responses feature does help to an extent, but when you’re strapped for time and have more to say, it’s not quite up to the task.
Gorgias is a handy free extension for Chrome that lets you create custom templates to use in any email app, with the ability to personalize your preset outgoing messages with the recipient’s name.
For example, if you want to reply to a customer’s tech support question, you can create a template that reads, ‘Hi [Sender’s first name], thanks for contacting our help desk’, and add it to your message with a simple keyboard shortcut.
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Other variables include the sender’s name, email address and the subject. It’d be nice to see more options such as the current day, date and time included in the menu; hopefully those will be included in an update.
While Gorgias is already a neat tool for personal use, its paid version really makes sense for groups. If you work with a team, you can share these templates automatically with your colleagues for uniform messaging every time.
That makes perfect sense for sales teams and support departments, who frequently need to write and reply to customers without sounding like a machine.
The paid extension lets anyone in a team create and update templates, which are automatically synced to everyone’s browsers. That’s certainly useful but seems a little pricey at $7.59 (€6.99) a month per user.
The two-man team behind Gorgias says they’re working to add more features including response time stats for support teams, and more variables depending on the demand for them.
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