Facebook has a new customer service feature for businesses pages, which would enable them to serve a canned response to users who send them messages. Early comments about the feature are pretty positive, and it’s not hard to see why it would be well received given that response times are notoriously poor on social media.

TechCrunch reports on the feature, saying that it’s currently only available to a limited number of pages. We’ve yet to see it firsthand.

It’s called Saved Replies, and does exactly what it sounds like. It lets businesses save replies that can be re-used to respond to various customer service queries. Sarah Perez reports:

Businesses are initially offered a couple of sample replies they can use out-of-the-box or customize, we’re told, or they can simply create their own. After set up is complete, to use a saved reply, you just click on it from the list and it automatically appears in the body of the email. You can also access the option from the messages reply box, where a new option lets you click a small icon to respond with a Saved Response.

Also handy is the fact that the replies themselves can be personalized using auto-populating placeholders similar to what you would use with form email messages, for example. There are personalization options that let you insert a person’s first name or last name, the admin’s first or last name as well as the website URL.

Page admins can also reportedly search through their existing saved replies to find the ones they want to use. You can click over to the report linked above for a screenshot of the admin interface.

Earlier this year, Facebook was spotted testing a feature that tells page admins what their typical response time is in an effort to help them improve customer service.

According to SocialBakers, brands were asked nearly 22 million questions on Facebook and Twitter combined last year, but as of last month, so far this year, only 4% of brands are “socially devoted” on Facebook.

Facebook’s new customer service-centric features-in-testing could help many businesses become more so.

As we discussed in a recent article, Facebook (believe it or not) has been offering a lot of small business friendly features of late.

Image via Facebook