Every shared inbox accumulates saved replies, and every one of them was accurate on the day it was written. Nothing in the tool tells you when that stopped being true. The customer finds out first.
How it happens
A macro gets written by whoever was on shift when a question came up twice. It is correct, it saves 90 seconds, and it gets used 400 times. Then the settings screen moves, the refund window goes from 14 days to 30, the integration it mentions is deprecated. The macro does not change, because changing it is nobody’s job. One library of 68 saved replies at a 9-person team had 21 that had not been edited in over a year, and 6 that named a screen no longer in the product.
Sort by last used, not by name
The macro list in most helpdesks sorts alphabetically, which is the least useful order available. Sort by send count instead. The top 10 usually cover 60 to 70 percent of all macro sends, and those 10 are the only ones worth a scheduled review. Everything below the top 30 is dead weight — written once, used twice, kept because deleting things feels risky. Delete them anyway. An agent scrolling past 60 options to find the right one is slower than an agent typing the answer.
A review that takes 40 minutes a quarter
Once a quarter, one person opens the top 20 by send count and reads each one against the product as it stands today. Anything naming a price, a button or a number of days gets checked. Anything that cannot be verified in two minutes gets archived rather than guessed at. Forty minutes, four times a year. The cost of skipping it is a customer holding a screenshot of your own saved reply, asking why it describes a screen they cannot find.
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