Answer Customers Faster with AI · Lesson 1 of 7
Collect the questions you really get
20 minutes. Before the AI writes a word, find out what your customers actually ask.
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Most people start with the AI. Paste in an email, ask for a reply, see what happens. The reply sounds fine. Then it says you're open Saturdays, and you're not.
The AI didn't fail. It guessed, because nobody told it the facts. This course fixes that, and it starts here, with no AI at all. You're going to collect the questions customers really ask, in their words, so that by Lesson 2 you know exactly what to write down.
Throughout this course, I'll use one made-up business as an example. Maple Street Plumbing & Heating is a fictional six-person company. Dana owns it. Rosa runs the office and answers the phone, the email, the website form and the texts. Rosa is good at it. She also answers "do you charge for estimates?" about nine times a week.
Swap in your own business as you go. A clinic, a shop and a law office all have their own version of Rosa's nine-times-a-week question.
Two reasons.
First, speed. A customer who asks a simple question and waits until tomorrow often asks someone else tonight. Most of those simple questions have the same answer every time. If the answer is written down once, a reply can be drafted in seconds.
Second, the next kind of customer. On October 7, 2026, Sierra and Meta announced the Personal Agent Protocol, with partners including Shopify, Stripe and Walmart. It describes how a customer's own AI assistant can look up what a business offers, check something like a returns policy, and act for that person. A first version of the specification is due later this month. It's early. But it points one way: some of your "customers" will soon be software asking your questions on someone's behalf. A business with clear, written answers is ready for both kinds.
Questions come in from more places than you think. Tick the ones you have:
- Email (the main inbox, plus any info@ or office@ address)
- Website contact form (often lands in email)
- Texts to the business phone
- Social messages (Facebook, Instagram)
- Online reviews (Google, Yelp, Facebook). Reviews often contain questions too: "wish I'd known they charge for parking."
- Phone calls. The biggest source for most small businesses, and the one with no written record. You'll fix that in Step 3.
Open your sent mail and your texts. Scroll back about 30 days. You're not reading every message. You're looking for questions you answered more than once.
On a sheet of paper or in a blank document, write each question the way the customer asked it, not the way you'd file it. "How much to fix a leaky faucet?" is better than "pricing: repairs." Customers' words are what the AI will see later.
Put a tally mark next to a question each time you see it again.
Rosa's list after ten minutes looked like this:
- Do you charge for estimates? ||||| |||
- What are your hours? ||||| |
- Do you do emergency calls on weekends? |||||
- How much is a water heater replacement? ||||
- Do you service my area (town name)? ||||
- Can you send someone today? ||||
- Do you take credit cards? |||
- Is the work guaranteed? ||
One rule while you do this: you're copying the question, not the customer. Leave out names, addresses, phone numbers and account details. You don't need them, and you don't want them in a document you'll later paste into an AI tool.
Phone questions vanish the moment you hang up. For one week, keep a sticky note or a notepad by the phone and write a few words after each call: "price for drain cleaning," "open Saturday?"
If more than one person answers the phone, put the note where everyone can see it. At the end of the week, add the tallies to your list.
You don't need to wait a week to start Lesson 2. Start with what you have and add the phone questions when they come in.
Sort your list by tally marks, most first. Keep the top 20. If you have fewer than 20, that's fine. Twelve good ones beat twenty vague ones.
Then mark each question with one letter:
- A for answer the same way every time. Hours, area served, payment methods, whether you charge for estimates.
- D for depends. The answer needs a detail: which model, which day, which insurance plan. The AI can draft these if you tell it what to ask.
- P for person. A person should always answer: complaints, refunds, billing disputes, anything legal or medical. You'll still list them, because the AI needs to know to hand these over.
Open the Answer Bank template for this course. Fill in the Question column with your top 20 (or however many you have), in customers' own words, with the tally count and the A, D or P letter beside each.
Check it worked
- You have at least 10 real questions, each written the way a customer would ask it.
- Each one has a tally count and an A, D or P.
- There are no customer names, addresses or account numbers anywhere on the list.
- You have a phone note started, and everyone who answers the phone knows about it.
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Next: you have the questions. Now write the answers, once, so nobody has to remember them again.
→ Lesson 2: Write your answer bank