Lesson 3 · 10 min
Draft replies to routine customer emails
By the end
A reusable answer bank, and a reply draft you’d actually send.
Learn · 4 min
Why an answer bank beats a clever prompt
Most routine emails are variations on a dozen questions you’ve already answered well. If you give the AI those real answers first, it matches your facts and your voice instead of inventing both.
The bank also becomes a team asset: new hires answer like you do, and you only update a policy in one place.
Skip the bank and the AI fills the gaps with plausible guesses: a returns window you don’t offer, a delivery date you can’t keep. It sounds just as sure either way, because it’s predicting a likely reply, not looking up your policy.
Start with 20 real questions
Go back through your sent folder or shared inbox and pick the questions that keep coming back: delivery times, returns, booking changes, what the price includes. For each one, copy the best reply you actually sent. Twenty is a rule of thumb: enough to cover most routine questions, few enough to check in one sitting. Five is plenty to start today.
The AI copies tone as faithfully as facts, so skip the reply you wrote in a hurry. Remove names, email addresses and order numbers before you paste anything, and check your plan’s data settings.
The prompt groups similar questions, so twenty might boil down to a dozen topics. Each topic in the bank gets four things:
- A plain name for the topic, like “Late deliveries”
- The question, the way customers actually ask it
- Your approved answer, in your voice
- Who owns it, and when it was last checked
Draft from the bank, not from scratch
When a routine email comes in, paste the matching answers along with the new email and ask for a reply that uses only those answers. Anything the bank doesn’t cover gets marked [CHECK] instead of guessed. The tag won’t catch every mistake, but it shows you where to look first. You’ll use the same tag in the lessons that follow.
If an email matches nothing in the bank, it isn’t routine: answer it yourself, and add your answer to the bank if the question comes back. An upset customer isn’t routine either, even with a routine question. Use the bank for the facts and write the opening yourself.
The same method works in your email tool’s built-in assistant, if your plan has one. Either way, the AI drafts and you send. And keep the bank current: when a price or policy changes, update the answer first, or the old one will keep going out, politely, to every customer who asks.
In one sentence
Give the AI your real answers first; it’s far better at matching your voice than inventing it.
Try it on your business
6 minStart your answer bank from replies you’ve already sent, then test it on one new email.
- 1
Paste 5–20 real customer questions and the answers you gave. Remove names, email addresses and order numbers first.
- 2
Copy the prompt and run it in your assistant.
- 3
Save the result to your answer bank: a shared doc or sheet with one row per topic.
- 4
Test it on one new email. In the same chat, paste the email with names, email addresses and order numbers removed, and ask: “Draft a reply using only the answers above. Mark anything they don’t cover with [CHECK].”
You’re helping me reply to customers of [my business]. Here are real questions and the answers I gave: [paste]. 1. Group them into topics. 2. Write one short, friendly model answer per topic, in my voice. 3. Mark anything you’re unsure about with [CHECK].
Human check: before you use it
Which reply needs the closest check before sending?
Ask the Distillery
Answers come from The Distillery’s own pages, with sources.
If the Distillery doesn’t know, it says so and points you to a person.