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An AI workshop does not make customers happy. Your people, your product and your service do that. What a workshop can do is show your team where AI makes customer contact faster and more consistent, and where it is better left alone.
This article is for business owners who wonder whether a workshop is worth it for their customer contact. It is not a sales pitch: we also say what does not work.
What do you do in a workshop like this?
A good workshop on customer contact works with your own situation, not with a demo. It usually comes down to this:
- You list the questions customers ask most often, per channel: email, phone, chat and quote requests.
- You have an AI assistant (such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude or Gemini) write draft replies and check them critically for mistakes and tone.
- You practise summarising: a long email thread or a complaint file in five lines.
- You agree what must never go into an AI tool, such as customers' personal data in a free version.
- You choose one or two tasks to try out for real over the coming weeks.
What does research say?
The best-known study comes from customer support. Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond followed 5,179 agents who were given an AI assistant. On average they resolved about 14 per cent more issues per hour. For novices the gain was about 34 per cent. For experienced agents the effect was small.
Note what this does not prove. It covered the staff of one company using one AI assistant, not a small business after a workshop. Whether your customers end up happier depends on what you do with it.
Where it goes wrong
- AI writes fluently, even when it is wrong. An answer about delivery time, price or warranty needs checking by someone who knows.
- Customers notice a stock reply. Adjust the tone and details before you send.
- Anyone who pastes customer data into a tool without knowing what the provider does with it runs a privacy risk. Read the terms and keep the GDPR in mind.
- Always give customers a route to a person, even if you use AI for first replies.
How to tell whether it helps
Choose something you already track: the response time on email, the number of recurring questions or the number of complaints about slow handling. Measure it before the workshop and again a few months later. Without measuring, all you know is that it felt good. And do not count on a single half-day: the gain comes from the practice that follows.
What to bring to the workshop
- Ten real customer emails, with names and other details removed.
- The five questions you get most often.
- Your house style and tone, so that draft replies fit.
Want to know first where AI could save time in your own processes? Take a look at our small AI workflow analysis. Get in touch with us by email or directly via WhatsApp ⇲.
Source
Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond, Generative AI at Work (NBER, 2023) ⇲