How to Train New Employees on Using TextExpander: Tips and Best Practices

Hiring and training new employees is a time-consuming and challenging process for any business, especially in customer service and customer success roles. These employees play a critical role in ensuring that customers receive the best possible experience, which can make a significant impact on the success of the business and its public appearance with customers.

However, providing effective training for new employees can be a tough task, especially when it comes to teaching them the specific skills and tools required for their roles with interacting with customers and staying on brand with messaging.

“A brand is what a business does, reputation is what people remember.”
Ted Rubin

This is where TextExpander comes in. TextExpander is a powerful productivity tool that allows users to create Snippets for frequently used phrases, paragraphs, or entire documents. This saves time and reduces the risk of errors that can occur when typing the same content repeatedly. By providing new employees with the right training on how to use TextExpander, businesses can improve the onboarding period for new employees, helping them to learn faster and deliver better customer service from day one.

“We actually doubled the size of our team during COVID. But we were all remote. And so all of the training was remote. But because we had [TextExpander as] our knowledge base, it was really easy to train people,” says Ty Schalamon, who served as a technical support manager at SketchUp for several years.

In this ultimate guide, we’ll:

Explore how to effectively train new employees on using TextExpander, providing tips and best practices for maximizing productivity and streamlining workflows.

Cover the basics of using TextExpander during the employee onboarding process.

Examine the benefits of using TextExpander as a chatbot with a human touch.

Show how to search for Snippets in TextExpander.

Look at how you can use TextExpander with other tools.

By the end of this guide, you will have a clear understanding of how to use TextExpander to improve the onboarding process for new employees, making it easier and more efficient for them to learn their new roles and deliver exceptional customer service—regardless of employee experience.

“It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help, than it is to try to mend a broken customer relationship.”
Mark Cuban

Basic TextExpander training tips

For a new hire who has never used TextExpander before, it can be a bit overwhelming to get started. Here are some basic tips to help you explain how to use TextExpander to a new hire:

Explain the concept of Snippets: Start by giving a simple overview of what TextExpander does and how it works. Use examples that are relevant to their role or tasks, such as how to quickly respond to a customer email.

Show them the basics: Show them how to access TextExpander, and how to customize the settings, such as the abbreviations, the Snippet library, and the formatting options.

Create and edit Snippets: Show your new hire how to create a new Snippet by selecting the “New Snippet” button or the keyboard shortcut, and how to type the abbreviation, the content, and the optional placeholders or fill-in fields. Explain using the TextExpander editor to format a Snippet, add images or links, or insert dynamic content, such as dates, times, or clipboard content. Also, show them how to edit or delete existing Snippets, and how to organize them into groups. You’ll also want to ensure they have access to the company Snippet library.

Practice and optimize: Encourage the new hire to practice using TextExpander in real-life scenarios, such as writing emails and responding to customers, and refine their Snippets based on feedback and experience.

See Getting Started: TextExpander 101 for an in-depth guide to getting started with TextExpander.

Set up Snippets for Inline Search in TextExpander

TextExpander Inline Search is a crucial feature new employees should learn during onboarding. Inline Search lets employees quickly find the Snippets they need, even if they don’t know the exact wording or formatting.

“You teach them how to search TextExpander to find things and the keywords to search for. When customers write in and ask a question, [the CS agent] can type in some of those words from that email, find the answer, and just paste it in,” Ty says.

“Because we had this knowledge base that was shared, when a new issue would come up, someone could quickly save it, and share it with the team,” Ty adds.

Inline Search lets TextExpander act as a knowledge base for your team. However, to make the most of the search functionality, it’s essential to use best practices for naming Snippets, and that starts by grouping your Snippets based on their purpose.

For example, you can create a Group for all customer service-related Snippets, another folder for sales-related Snippets, and so on. By grouping Snippets, your team can quickly find the Snippets they need without having to scroll through a long list.

The other advantage of grouping Snippets is that it makes them easy to share with your team. TextExpander Business accounts let managers create Snippet Groups and automatically share them with their teams, which makes messaging consistent and easy to change.

You also want your Snippets to have a consistent naming convention based on your Group names so your team can quickly locate the Snippets they need. One way to do this is by using Group prefixes to indicate which department or situation the Snippet is designed for. For example, if a Snippet is designed for the customer service department, and it’s in a Group named “Customer Service,” you should give it a Group prefix of “cs.” so the Snippet abbreviation would be cs.snippetname.

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Thank you for your email! I’m happy to look into this for you.

I’m happy to walk you through our active-user-based billing system. TextExpander works on pre-purchased credits, where 1 user needs 1 credit a month, or 12 credits per year. We only deduct credits for users that expand a Snippet within a billing period.

There are two payment plans available:

Annual Payment: You purchase 12 months’ worth of credits per user on your billing date at a 20% discount.

Monthly Payment: You pay for one credit per user at the beginning of each month

Once you use up your credits, you are charged again at the start of the next billing period, either for another year on the annual plan or for the next month on the monthly plan. There are also additional billing resources at this link.

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Thanks so much for reaching out and I’m sorry to hear that you’re having trouble. I’ve included a link here that should explain the proper way to troubleshoot this issue. Can you please follow the steps and let us know if the problem has been resolved?

Use inline search effectively

Also, it’s important to note that new employees should be trained to use the search functionality in TextExpander effectively as they onboard into the organization. With several ways to search for Snippets within TextExpander, you can easily find what you need without scrolling through long lists. Here are some ways new customer service agents can search for Snippets in TextExpander so they can respond to customers faster and more accurately.

Search in place using the inline search hotkey

Inline Search is a convenient way to search for Snippets without moving away from the text field you are currently in. The default hotkey for each platform:

macOS: Command + /

Windows: Control + /

Chrome: Control + Period

You can customize the hotkey in TextExpander > Preferences > Hotkeys.

After pressing the hotkey, start typing in the TextExpander search window. Select the Snippet you need from the search results and insert it directly into your text.

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