A WorkLighter how-to

How to use AI to reply to customer emails

You use AI to reply to customer emails by turning an AI assistant (a chat tool costing about £20 a month) into your drafter: you show it three of your past replies so it learns how you write, paste in each new customer email, and it hands back a draft for you to check and send. It drafts, you send, and that split is the whole method.

Most customer email doesn't need your judgement, only your typing. If you run a salon, the inbox is appointment moves and price checks on repeat, with the odd "are you open bank holiday Monday". You've typed each answer more times than you can count, which is exactly why a machine can now type it for you.

Which emails should AI draft, and which are yours?

Sort first, write second. Watch your inbox for a week and you'll see every email lands in one of three piles:

• Needs no reply. Newsletters, receipts, marketing from suppliers, anything you were copied in on out of politeness. Bin or file, no guilt.
• AI drafts it. Anything you've answered before in nearly the same words: booking changes, price questions, opening hours, deposit rules, "do you do balayage". Usually the biggest pile by a distance.
• You write it. Complaints, apologies, anything where someone's upset or money has gone wrong, anything you'd want your insurer to see before it leaves. This pile needs your judgement, and it's smaller than you fear.

The test is simple. If your reply would look almost identical to one you sent last month, it goes to the assistant. If getting the tone slightly wrong could cost you the customer, it's yours from the first word.

How do you get drafts that sound like you?

Don't describe your style, show it. Telling an assistant to "be friendly but professional" produces the same beige politeness for everyone who types it. Instead, open your sent folder and copy three replies you're quietly pleased with. Pick ones doing different jobs, and make sure at least one is you saying no, because how you turn someone down is the most personal thing in your writing.

Why three? One reply shows a mood; three show a pattern. Your greeting, your sign-off, how long your sentences run, whether you use the customer's name, whether you sign off with an x. The assistant copies patterns, and the drafts stop reading like a call centre.

Here's a prompt that does it. Swap in your own emails and keep it saved somewhere you can paste from.

You draft replies to my customer emails so they sound like me, not like a call centre.

Below are three replies I actually sent. Copy how I write: greeting, sign-off, formality, sentence length.

REPLY 1: [paste a real reply]
REPLY 2: [paste a real reply]
REPLY 3: [paste a real reply]

Rules for every draft:
- British English, under 120 words unless the question needs more.
- If you'd have to guess a price, a date, a time or a policy, write [CHECK THIS] where the fact should go. Never guess.
- Never promise anything I haven't told you, especially money or dates.
- If the email is unclear, ask me one question instead of drafting a vague reply.

Now draft a reply to this email:
[paste the customer's email]

Save it once, and the daily work becomes pasting an email in and reading what comes back. When you get bored of filling the same [CHECK THIS] gaps, paste your price list and opening hours into the prompt too, and most of them disappear.

Why must you press send yourself?

Because the assistant is sometimes confidently wrong, and it's your name at the bottom. These tools don't know your diary or this week's prices, and when they don't know something they tend to invent a plausible answer rather than admit it: an opening time you've never kept, a deposit policy you've never had. The [CHECK THIS] rule catches most of this. The final pair of eyes is still you.

So the rule is fixed and a little boring: AI drafts, you send. No exceptions, even after a month of flawless drafts. Some email tools now offer to answer customers automatically with no human check. Turn that off. The customer whose colour went wrong should never get a machine's first attempt at an apology.

Reading a short draft takes moments. Writing it never did. You keep the saved time and the final say.

What does this look like day to day?

Email turns from a writing job into a checking job. A typical run: open the inbox, bin the no-reply pile, paste the routine ones into the assistant one at a time, read each draft, fix anything in brackets, send. The handful that need the real you get written while you're fresh, not last thing at night. And the worst part of email, staring at an empty reply wondering how to start, mostly goes, because editing a decent attempt is easier than starting one.

One honest limit: the assistant won't reliably spot that an email is a complaint dressed as a question, so the sorting stays your job for good. Fair trade. Sorting takes seconds; the writing was the slow part.

If you want this as a follow-along with nothing left to work out, it's Recipe 1 in The Time Refund, the £49 playbook behind this site, where it's called The email triage and reply desk (triage is just the sorting you did above) and comes with the exact prompts and its slot in the 30-day plan. A later recipe, The customer FAQ bot without the faff, goes one step further and answers the same five questions before they ever become emails. If you'd rather judge the format before spending anything, the quotes and estimates recipe is free to read in full.