How Jane Helps 319 Support Reps Reply Faster and Still Sound Like Themselves

Jane is a practice management platform and EMR (electronic medical record) built for health and wellness clinics. More than 250,000 practitioners, from physical therapists and chiropractors to psychologists, counselors, and professionals in 40+ other disciplines, rely on it to run their clinics. Its mission is to Help the Helpers by building software that helps small businesses thrive.

Serving that many practitioners means a large support team having personal, human conversations across chat and email every day. When Jane moved to a new support tool, its saved replies didn’t come along, which gave Customer Insights and Enablement Expert Amy-Lynn Taylor the opening to find a tool that worked everywhere reps did.

The challenge: Saved replies in someone else’s voice

Jane prioritizes human, personalized experiences for every customer interaction, but Amy-Lynn Taylor, Jane’s Customer Insights and Enablement Expert, noticed the team’s tools weren’t keeping up.

Chats were stored in Help Scout, but when Jane switched to a new tool, Help Scout’s saved replies didn’t come with them. That’s when Amy-Lynn realized their team needed a tool that worked across every channel reps used, not just inside one app. Plus, Taylor recognized their saved replies actually needed some improvement anyway. 

“One thing that we found challenging with the saved replies was that often employees pulled from a few giant replies. The responses were in someone else’s voice, and you almost spent more time fixing that reply to sound like you, or to match the issue that you were trying to solve,” she explained. “It took more time than it would have taken you if you had just created the email from scratch.”

Support reps were managing by copy-and-pasting their own replies in Google Docs because they wanted them to reflect their personality and style. But without a system to keep them current, those replies quickly became outdated. In Taylor’s words, “Replies so quickly got out of date and sometimes even misinformation in them.”

Finding the tool that worked everywhere

Taylor, who had used TextExpander while working at Shopify, described it as a “where has this been my entire life?” kind of tool.

She pitched the solution to leadership, and they handed her the project. Taylor assembled a team of six colleagues to test and evaluate text expansion tools. After an audit of TextExpander and five competitors, the top two advanced to real reps for hands-on testing.

TextExpander led from the first scoring round and won the hands-on round, too.

For the Jane team, what set TextExpander apart was its robust Snippet features and its ability to work on any device, in any program. What sold the team was how intuitive it felt to use.

Taylor’s biggest question for the testing reps was, “‘If you have almost no instruction, can you figure it out?’ That’s what we really wanted to know.”

A two-library system: “Your voice where it matters, our words where they have to be exact”

Taylor and the team developed a way to keep personalization without losing accuracy:

• Shared libraries, owned by expert teams: These maintain important technical language and instructions that need to be accurate every time
• Personal libraries, maintained by each rep: Used for intros, outros, check-ins, and those moments of delight where they want to maintain their own voice.

When asked how she measured whether TextExpander was right for her team, Taylor outlined three criteria she considered: usage, improvements in responses, and team approval.

Taylor told us that usage is high and the support channel she created in Slack for TextExpander is “a ghost town,” because “it just works. It just never goes wrong.”

On the team approval and ticket improvement side, the Jane team has been impressed with what TextExpander has done: “We’ve definitely seen more chat efficiency, fewer errors, and better handle times since TextExpander, but the most important one for us is that our team just loves it,” she said.

“All I needed to ask was ‘Does the team love it? Do they use it? Does it make their lives easier?’ And for our team, it’s a resounding yes.”

The Results

Over the past 12 months, Jane has expanded 741,897 Snippets across support, enablement, and training, saving an estimated 6,034 hours. That’s 754 business days across the team, or 19.5 hours per person. Each team member got about 2.5 business days back.

The qualitative impact is just as tangible. The internal TextExpander help chat is a ghost town. Everyone uses TextExpander, and no one has trouble.