Macro (Canned response)

Macros store the answers your team sends over and over, such as refund steps, shipping updates, and password resets, so a common reply is an insert rather than a fresh paragraph. Good ones leave placeholders for the name, the order number, and the specifics, so the finished message reads like it was written for that person rather than pulled off a shelf.

The word means two different things depending on which tool you came from, and the difference matters when you are comparing software. In the narrow sense, a macro is a text snippet, which is the same thing other tools call a canned response, a saved reply, or a template. In the wider sense, made popular by the big help desks, a macro is a bundle of actions: insert this text, set the status to pending, add the billing tag, and assign it to the finance queue, all from one click. When a vendor lists macros as a feature, find out which of the two they mean.

For a team of two to ten, the case for macros is pure arithmetic and worth doing once. Take a month of conversations and count how many are the same handful of questions. Say 30 of 200 are the refund request, and writing that reply properly from scratch takes five minutes while inserting a snippet and personalizing it takes one. That is 4 minutes saved 30 times, or two hours a month, from one piece of text you write once. Do that for your top five questions and you have bought back most of a working day.

The failure mode is tone. A reply that is 100 percent macro reads as canned, and customers can tell, particularly when it answers a question adjacent to the one they asked. The rule that survives contact with reality is to use snippets for the parts that genuinely do not vary, such as the refund policy wording, the steps to reset a password, the address to post returns to, and to write the first and last sentences yourself. The second failure mode is staleness: a snippet with last year price in it will keep being sent long after the price changed, so snippets need the same review habit as help center articles.

Macros also have a quiet second life as documentation. If you have written a snippet for a question, that question is common enough to deserve a help center article, and the snippet is most of the draft. Turning your five most used snippets into five public articles is usually the cheapest self-service project a small team can run.

AcornReply calls them message shortcuts. You type an exclamation mark followed by a keyword while composing a reply and the saved text is inserted, placeholders resolve against that conversation, and shortcuts can be shared across the whole organization or scoped to one workspace, up to 200 of them. There is a "Save as shortcut" control on a message you have already sent, so a good reply becomes reusable without retyping it. Being precise about the limit: these insert text and resolve placeholders, they do not change status, apply tags, or reassign, so they are macros in the snippet sense and not in the bundled-actions sense.

The other half of the answer is that most of what macros exist for is handled before you get there. Every incoming conversation gets an AI draft written for that specific message, grounded in your help center and your own resolved replies, in the voice profile your workspace picked. That covers the repeat questions without anyone maintaining a snippet library for them, which leaves shortcuts for the things that must be worded exactly the same way every time, such as policy text and legal wording.