New in Supora: tags, canned messages, and a command palette

Email and live chat now land in one Supora inbox. When both channels feed the same queue it gets busier, and that’s when the slow parts of answering show up. You’re scanning to find which conversation needs you first. You’re typing out the shipping-policy reply for the fourth time today. You’re reaching for the mouse to do something your keyboard could have handled. This release goes after all three. Case tags to organise the queue, canned messages so you stop retyping, and a command palette to run both without leaving the keyboard.

Case tags: sort the queue the way you triage

Supora already sorts every incoming conversation into a category (question, complaint, feedback, other) from the first message. That’s automatic and it never changes. Tags are the layer you control on top.

Every workspace starts with five tags built in: Urgent, Waiting on customer, Escalated, Follow-up, and VIP. These are workflow words on purpose. They tell you what to do with a conversation rather than what it’s about. You can apply and remove them on any conversation, and add up to 25 of your own on top: Refunds, Billing, Bug, whatever matches how your support actually splits up.

You tag right in the thread. Start typing in the tag box and it filters your existing tags as you go. If nothing matches, a “Create ’…’” option shows up at the bottom of the list, so a brand-new tag is one keystroke away from existing and getting applied. No trip to settings first.

Where it pays off is the inbox list. Each conversation shows its tags as small coloured chips next to the subject, and there’s now a tag filter sitting beside the status and assignment filters you already have. Tick Urgent and VIP and the list narrows to conversations carrying either one, still respecting whichever status tab and assignee you’ve got selected. That’s really the point of tags: at 9am you filter to Urgent and clear those before you touch anything else.

The five system tags are fixed. You can apply them, but you can’t rename or delete them, so they mean the same thing in every workspace. Your custom tags are yours to rename, recolour, and delete from the new Tags tab in settings. Deleting one pulls it off every conversation it was on, so before it goes you get a confirmation telling you how many conversations that’ll touch.

Canned messages: stop retyping the same reply

Do support for any length of time and you notice a handful of replies make up most of your day. “Here’s how to reset your password.” “We’ve shipped a fix, can you confirm?” “Thanks for the report, here’s where it stands.” Canned messages let you save those once and drop them into the composer when you need them.

There are two libraries. Shared messages belong to the workspace, so everyone on the team can use them, which is how you keep replies consistent across operators. My messages are personal to you, for the phrasings only you reach for. Both live in the new Canned messages tab in settings.

The bit that saves the most fumbling is placeholders. Write a message with tokens like {{customer_name}} or {{ticket_ref}}, and when you insert it into a reply, Supora fills them in from the conversation you’re looking at. There are five:

• {{customer_name}}: the customer on the thread
• {{customer_email}}: their email address
• {{workspace_name}}: your workspace
• {{operator_name}}: your name, for the sign-off
• {{ticket_ref}}: the conversation’s reference, like [acme-1284]

So a template that opens Hi {{customer_name}}, and signs off — {{operator_name}} comes out personal every time without you touching either line. And if a placeholder has nothing to fill (a customer who emailed without a display name, say), the literal {{customer_name}} stays in the text instead of leaving you with an empty “Hi ,”. You’ll spot it sitting there and fix it before you send, rather than finding it later in the sent copy.

There are two ways to drop one in. A button on the composer toolbar opens your messages with search, or you can use the / slash trigger: type / followed by a shortcut you set up (say /refund) and it pulls that message straight in. Once your hands learn the shortcuts, the slash route is the quick one.

We’ve written before about what makes a good canned response, and the gist still holds: a template is a starting point, not the finished reply. Placeholders get you most of the way to something that reads like you wrote it. You add the one sentence that’s actually specific to this customer.

A command palette to run it all from the keyboard

Tags and templates save typing, but you still click around to apply them. The command palette is what takes the clicking out. Press Cmd/Ctrl + K anywhere in the app and an overlay drops down with a search box and a list of things you can do right now.

Start typing and it searches your conversations by name, so it doubles as a jump-to-conversation: a few letters, hit Enter, and you’re in the thread without scrolling the list. When you’re already in a conversation, it surfaces the actions that make sense there: insert a canned message, apply or remove a tag, close or reopen, claim it, assign it to someone, jump to settings. Prefixes get you straight to what you want: / for canned messages, @ to assign, + for tags.

This one’s for the operator who’d rather not leave the keyboard. The whole loop of read, tag, reply, close can run without your hand ever finding the mouse. And the palette and the thread stay in sync, so a tag you apply from the palette shows on the conversation right away, and vice versa.

Try it

All three are live now for every workspace. The system tags are already seeded, so open any conversation and start tagging. Saved replies take a minute to set up in settings and pay you back the same afternoon. And Cmd/Ctrl + K works the moment you’ve got either one in place.

If you’d rather not start the canned-message library from scratch, we put together a pack of ready-to-edit support reply templates you can lift straight in.