There are many many productivity applications out there that help you ease your workflow. 

They each simplify an aspect of your work. But have you noticed how trying out a new application each time ends up contributing to the clutter? You find your work now spread across multiple disparate applications that are not so simple to keep track of. The end result: your productivity does not vastly improve regardless of the promises spewed on websites and social proof. Quite a bummer, isn’t it?

This is precisely why we chose to make OSlash different. It is not just another app for your work but a layer that makes working across the so many you already have super easy. 

This guide aims to help you out with understanding how OSlash enables you to navigate work blazingly fast. 

What is OSlash?

OSlash is a browser extension that allows you to transform your most frequently used snippets and links into human-readable shortcuts. 

You can download it for your browser or for your native applications on your Mac for free! 

OSlash helps users: 

1. Work blazingly fast
2. Save 30+ hours a month
3. Eliminate repetitive typing completely
4. Navigate your workplace intuitively
5. Surface information in an instant 

How does OSlash do all of this and more? With the help of its text expander and shortcuts. To get a better overview, let’s dive right in. 

Defining text expanders

A text expander is a tool that virtually types for you. It transforms your most frequently used snippets of text or code or images into an abbreviation such that when you use the abbreviation, text expander autofills the content for you. For example, with a text expander you can create a shortcut like o/intro so that it expands to:

Hi <Alex>. Hope you’re doing well. I head engineering at OSlash and would love to get your feedback on what we’re building here. Let me know if you’d like to connect soon.

A text expander can save a lot of time and effort, particularly when you type the same words or phrases repeatedly in pitches, cold outreach messages, recruitment emails, and canned responses.

What are the features of a text expander?

A text expander lets users do the following: 

• Transform frequently-used text or snippets into shortcuts such as o/intro or o/company-pitch
• Autofill content wherever required by simply typing the shortcut out
• Add images, code, screenshots, emojis, third language etc. to the snippet
• Add formatting to the snippet as required
• Add variable inputs to the snippet to make room for personalization

What are the key benefits of a text expander?

The world’s most productive people endeavor to automate as many things as possible. And we wanted to bring this power of automation to the hands of all our users. 

With a text expander, you’d be able to save time spent doing mindless repetitive tasks and gain a competitive edge. 

Here are the advantages of using snippets where you work. 

1. Faster response times. With snippets and templated responses, it is easier for customer support teams to address more queries faster. Faster response times and accurate replies agents translate into lower waiting times and a higher happiness quotient for customers.
   

2. Better quality and accuracy of information. Most businesses want to send out quality communication and maintain a good brand image at all times. In the absence of snippets, support and sales staff have to draft ad-hoc responses instantly and are thus more likely to make mistakes including inconsistencies in information, grammatical errors, and typos which can sour the quality of the customer’s experience.
   

3. Higher productivity. Snippets help reduce the repetitive, manual work of mindlessly typing the same text again and again. Regardless of the function you may be in, snippets can help supercharge your productivity, helping you save more than 30 hours a month.
   

4. Personalization. With variables in snippets, frequently sent out texts can be customized to include personalized information that makes the customer feel seen, heard, and valued. Customers are often more willing to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences.
   

5. Access to information. The propensity to use and contribute to a company’s knowledge base is highest when everyone knows how to access information.  And when the information you need appears where you are typing, you’re more likely to stay focused instead of going down some rabbit hole on the internet.
   
   With snippets, you can also leverage the collective wisdom of everyone in the company instead of working in silos. Your troubleshooting emails can be written by someone in IT, the canned responses can come directly from the product team, and the company pitch can be consistent with the marketing folks.
   

6. Scalability. One of the biggest benefits of using snippets is that it gives a business the superpower of scale. With shared snippets, your team will always be able to hit the right notes in all the messaging. Everyone’s snippets would get updated automatically whenever some tweaks are made, keeping everyone on the same page.
   
   
7. Consistent messaging. Lastly, choosing snippets gives a business the opportunity to incorporate the brand voice and tone into messages, emails, and other communication channels. This makes snippets consistent with the rest of the brand’s communication.

How do different teams benefit from a text expander in an organization?

1. Recruitment

Hiring. From inviting candidates to apply & scheduling interview calls to sending out rejection or acceptance emails, a human resource professional sends out multiple similar emails every day. Instead of allowing crafting emails to take multiple hours from the workday, it would be so much easier to automate the emails with the use of text expander. Craft each type of email and assign them shortcuts that can be inserted in the mail copy within seconds. 

Onboarding. Poor onboarding can leave a new candidate disengaged with low confidence, disassociated with the long-term company vision, and culture and at an increased risk of jumping ship if confronted with a better offer elsewhere. On the other hand, companies that implement a formal onboarding program could see 50% greater employee retention among new recruits and 62% greater productivity within the same group. While onboarding can be a tiresome task, it can be made super simple to implement across various teams with a text expander. Simply create shortcuts for onboarding candidates in different teams and create a flow such as

o/onboarding-design-1, followed by o/onboarding-design-2 and o/onboarding-design-3 to send out emails instantly. 

Outreach. Despite the Great Resignation, good candidates are not easy to come by. Talent recruitment teams have to continually send out the perfect company pitch to multiple personas at once to clock in sufficient leads. Wouldn’t it be awesome to type a word and have the pitch email or LinkedIn message ready to go?

Recommended reading: How to write the perfect cold recruitment email

2. Customer Support

Canned responses: Most live support chats follow a prescribed series of steps broadly including greeting a customer, enquiring about their problem, providing more information or offering an immediate solution, and ending the chat. While it is easier to repeat the same thing verbally to more than one customer, typing takes a lot more time. This is avoidable because each of these steps can be templated using a text expander. As a team, you can significantly reduce the time it takes you to reply, thereby keeping customers happy with immediate solutions. This helps nurture leads and hasten the road to conversion. 

Recommended reading: The ultimate guide to canned responses

3. Sales

Outreach: You can templatize your cold sales outreach emails to prospective customers and add fields such as {first-name} or {last-name} for personalization. You can even create a snippet with a meeting link/contact details/pre-recorded demo video that goes out to prospects as soon as they sign up on your website or express interest in being contacted. This outreach pitch can be carefully crafted and based on the development cycle of the product, it can be updated regularly for the entire team. 

Queries redressal: If your product is technical in nature, then your pre-sales and post-sales time will be inundated with multiple questions about the product. To not waste much time and respond to potential users as soon as possible, using a text expander is a brilliant idea. 

With text expanders that work for the entire team, you can ask the IT team, founders, support engineers, or product managers to craft the right response to technical questions and use them easily. Text expanders, thus, allow you to benefit from collective knowledge in an organization.

Recommended reading: The ultimate guide to sales productivity

4. Marketing

Company intro: As a marketer, you want to ensure that every time you communicate what your company does, you use the same blurb. There is nothing more important than maintaining consistency in communication and messaging. Marketers can easily use text expanders to create a shortcut such as o/company-intro to insert the message wherever required. 

Social media: ​​Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok—they’re not just places to entertain ourselves anymore. They’re also how your customers find you and get in touch with you to ask questions, raise issues, and if you’re lucky, shower compliments. To get more compliments than criticism, make sure to use text expanders to insert responses for the most common questions asked on your social media channels and for dealing with the trolling that is sometimes part of the job.

Recommended reading: Using canned responses for social media customer support

Now that we know how a text expander functions and benefits, let’s move on to shortcuts that pack an equal punch.

Understanding OSlash shortcuts

Google, Netflix, Uber, Meta, LinkedIn, Stripe - they have more in common than the fact that they’re all multi-billion dollar companies. 

They have a little secret that we happened to chance upon on our quest to make collaboration seamless. They all use shortcuts or simple human-readable words to access links in place of long URLs.

So your insurance policy can be accessed by using o/insurance instead of something this complicated — https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z68medKS1PG1e7NhpbM9NHTEMK44jP0J

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The benefits of using shortcuts

Work, and therefore life, gets simpler. ‍For one, you don’t have to remember where you’ve saved the file. You can create a shortcut for just about any URL across any app—Notion, Figma, Zoom, Google Docs, Slides, Confluence, or others—for you and your team. 

Second, you don’t have to hunt down a URL in your Slack threads, notes, emails, or wait for eons for someone to send it to you. You wish to get to a page? You can intuitively do so in less than a second. 

These shortcuts are typically private to the organization, meaning that members of the organization—company, school, etc—need to join a workspace in order to use them with a team. 

Apart from being able to share links conversationally (Oy! Check out o/roadmap), you can also insert links without copy-pasting URLs. How? By simply typing the shortcut out wherever you wish to insert it. The autocomplete feature would automatically convert the shortcut into a link. 

Here are the most frequent business use-cases for shortcuts

1. Greater workplace productivity

With information readily accessible to all employees, no one ever has to wonder: where the heck is that link now? 

Workplace productivity does not take a hit due to absence of enough context and resources. The proclivity to contribute to organizational knowledge comes from knowing where to find it and that’s exactly how OSlash changes the way work is done, documented, and shared across teams. 

Workers do not have to spend hours every week scurrying around for the right link. They can find, open, and access all their workplace links instantly thus making work blazingly fast. They can also search for the docs using the OSlash launcher or the search function with keywords. 

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2. An enterprise knowledge base

OSlash helps you take long, impossible-to-recall links built for the browsers and slash them into the exact opposite - quick intuitive shortcuts for humans.

By creating single sources of truth for each important document, OSlash brings everyone in the team on the same page, quite literally. As work no longer happens in files, but in links, OSlash provides organizatons a way to organize, structure, and navigate this labyrinth easily. 

Every shortcut gets saved to the dashboard that doubles up as an enterprise knowledge hub for the company where everyone can find what they need, instantly.

Try out OSlash today

OSlash comes with minimum installation effort, complete security, fast performance, and features that continue to surprise.

To everyone's delight, OSlash makes sure you no longer have to spin your wheels sifting through the myriad docs, texts, and apps to find information. So for an enterprise-ready go links solution, head to OSlash to power knowledge-sharing and boost productivity for everyone in your team.