Write the facts sheet first
Before any prompt, spend thirty minutes on one page. It is the highest-return half hour in this course.
On it: your prices, including the awkward ones. Hours. Where you deliver and where you do not. Turnaround times. What you do not do. Your refund position, in the words you actually use. Payment methods. And three questions customers ask that you find annoying, with your real answer written out.
A model without this page will not say "I don't know." It will produce something plausible. Plausible, in a price quote, means invented.
Paste the page into every conversation, or store it once — most tools have somewhere for standing instructions: a project, a custom assistant, a system prompt. Same effect. The facts travel with every reply.
A prompt that works
My business facts:
[paste the page]
Customer message:
"Hi, can you do a 3-tier cake for Saturday? Budget around 8,000."
Write a reply in my voice: short, warm, under 60 words,
no exclamation marks. If the facts sheet does not answer
part of the question, write [CHECK] instead of guessing.The last line is the load-bearing one. That bracket turns invention into a visible gap you can fill in three seconds. You will use it constantly.
Draft, read, send — in that order
There are three levels here and they are not equally safe.
It drafts, you read, you send. Safe. This is where nearly every small business should stay.
It suggests, you pick. Fine. Saved replies with a smarter picker.
It replies on its own. Genuinely risky, because the failure is not a clumsy sentence — it is a price you did not agree to, sent in your name, that a customer now reasonably expects you to honour.
If you are drawn to auto-send anyway, earn it: read 100 consecutive drafts and count the ones where you disagreed with something material. Under five, consider auto-sending one narrow category — opening hours, address, nothing with a number in it. Anywhere near ten, keep your thumb on the button.
The message you do not want to answer
The honest strength here is the angry customer at 9pm. You are not calm, and a first draft written by something that is not angry is worth having.
Two known failure modes. It over-apologises, accepting fault you have not established. And it over-promises — refunds, replacements, free redelivery — because agreeable text is what it was trained toward. Read every draft with one question: what did this just commit me to? Delete anything you did not decide to give.
Languages
This is where AI earns its keep for a lot of shops. A café in Barcelona replying in Catalan, Spanish and English. A guesthouse in Da Nang answering a Korean booking enquiry at midnight.
Quality varies a great deal by language, and the marketing never says so. English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin and Portuguese are strong across the major tools. Yoruba, Marathi, Sinhala, Quechua and hundreds of others range from serviceable to embarrassing, and can be confidently wrong in ways you cannot see. Before trusting a language you do not speak, have someone who does read ten replies. It costs a coffee and saves a reputation.
Do not pretend to be a person
If a bot answers first, say so in one line: "Automatic reply — Kemi will read this herself within four hours." People are fine with that. What they are not fine with is discovering, twenty messages in, that the friendly "Sarah" was never real.
And an honest waiting time beats a fake instant one. "We usually reply within four hours" is a promise you can keep. A cheerful machine answering in two seconds and getting it wrong is worse than silence.
The part that stays yours
The reply is fast now. The judgment is not automatable: whether to discount, whether to take this job at all, whether this customer is about to become a problem. Keep reading the messages. The moment you stop reading them, you have outsourced your feel for your own market to a tool that has never met one of your customers.
Before you move on