How We Work with Request Signatures in the Customer Experience Center – For Your Inspiration

I just thought that I would share a bit about how we at SuperOffice Customer Experience Center are working with signatures — maybe it will bring some inspiration.

No matter how much we tried to provide guides, templates in text, or templates in HTML, the signatures never looked the same for all users. Some supporters also came up with the idea to added an opening phrase with varaibles for the customer's name. This is one way to do it, but it's not optimal since a signature is by definition placed at the bottom of the message.

It may not sound like an issue to have 2 or 3 rows of spacing at the top of your message, but trust me — when you spend your entire day, five days a week, replying to customers, having to delete extra rows in every single message will get to you, and the time spent adds up. On top of that, the signature is only in one language, while many of our supporters work in two languages and may need to cover a third if needed.

Along came Request Type. This tool allowed us to include a reply template whenever we press reply in a request. The benefit of reply templates is that they will always look the same for all users, they support language variants, and they allow for more advanced formatting. We can also have different tempaltes added for different request types. 

At this point, things started to look good.


We could now have several language versions of the template based on the preferred language of the contact person we were communicating with. If we wanted to make any changes to the signature, we only had to change it in one place per lanugage. The last thing we did to complete the signature was to add the user's title. Unfortunately, the person card title for the user is not accessible from a request template, so what I did was create an extra field called "title."

(For faster adding of titels to users, and to get an overview of every users titels, you can use a ejuser selection in the old Service module) 
To make sure the signature looks good regardless of whether the user has a title — and to apply slightly different formatting depending on the title — I added some IF statements in the HTML of the template. In the source code it looks like this:

And in the editor it looks like this:

When a reply is created in a request, the signature will only show one of the three versions of the department field. I also made sure to add a few <br /> tags as spacing between the opening phrase and the signature. This gives the supporter a clear area to type their message and helps keep the formatting consistent.

This also results in single line breaks instead of the 1.5-line spacing that the editor for New Service uses by default.

I hope you found this solution inspiring — feel free to share other tips or setups you have created!