Getting Started with AI Assistants: A Practical Guide for Support Teams
2 min read
AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot are everywhere in the news — but the real question for us is simpler: how do we actually use them in customer relations work, safely and usefully? Here’s a practical starting guide.
What they’re genuinely great for
- Summarising. Paste a long, messy ticket or email thread and get the key points in seconds.
- First drafts. A reply to a common complaint, a FAQ entry, an apology message — AI drafts, you edit. Editing is faster than writing from zero.
- Explaining. Ask it to explain a product, policy or error message in plain language, like you would to a customer.
- Practising. Ask it to role-play an angry customer so you can rehearse a difficult conversation before the real one.
The rules: use your head
Three rules keep you safe. First: never paste customer personal data into a public AI tool — no names, phone numbers, account details. Use a scenario instead of the real ticket. Second: AI writes confidently even when it’s wrong. Always verify facts against our official sources before sending anything to a customer. Third: the AI is your assistant, not your replacement — the message goes out under your name, so the final check is always yours.
A 10-minute exercise to try this week
Take a real (anonymised) complaint you’ve handled. Ask an AI assistant to: 1) summarise the customer’s main issue in two sentences, 2) draft an empathetic reply, 3) list two things the customer might ask next. Compare its draft to what you actually sent. You’ll learn a lot about both the tool and your own writing — that’s the fastest way to build real AI skill, and it’s exactly the kind of thing we’ll cover in upcoming workshops.
