The highest-return half hour in this course
Everything you are going to ask this thing to do depends on facts it does not have. Write them down once, properly, and every prompt after that gets shorter and safer.
Set a timer for thirty minutes and write a single page. Not a brochure. A briefing document for a competent new employee who starts tomorrow and will be answering your customers by lunchtime.
What goes on it
Six sections. Keep it plain; nobody is reading this for pleasure.
Prices. Including the awkward ones. The base price, what pushes it up, what you charge for a rush job, your minimum order, delivery charges by area. If a price is “it depends”, write down what it depends on: that sentence is what stops the invention.
Time. Opening hours, turnaround, lead times, how far ahead you book, how long a quote stays valid.
Boundaries. Where you deliver and where you do not. What you do not do. Sizes you do not stock. Jobs you turn down. This section prevents more damage than any other, because a model asked about something outside your range will happily say yes.
Terms. Deposit, payment methods, your refund position in the words you actually use, your cancellation rule, your guarantee.
Voice. Three or four lines: formal or casual, whether you use the customer’s name, whether you use exclamation marks, what you never say. Better still, a link to the examples in the next lesson.
The annoying questions. Three or four questions customers ask that irritate you, each with your real answer written out. These are the ones you answer badly when tired, and they are exactly the ones worth having drafted well.
Where to put it
Three options, same effect.
- Paste it at the top of every conversation. Crude, free, works everywhere, and you will get bored of it by Wednesday.
- Standing instructions. Most tools have somewhere the text lives permanently: custom instructions, a project, a saved assistant, a system prompt. Set it once and every conversation starts with your facts already in place.
- As a file. Upload the page as a document and refer to it. Useful when it grows past a page, and it makes the dating visible.
Option two is right for most people. Whichever you choose, keep the master copy in a file you own, not only inside a vendor’s product. You will need it again when you change tools.
Date it, and diarise it
Put the date at the top. Then put a repeating reminder in your diary: quarterly is about right.
The reason is a failure mode that is worse than having no facts sheet at all. A stale sheet is confidently wrong. Six months after a price rise, a page that says 7,400 will produce a reply quoting 7,400, in your voice, with none of the hesitancy a model shows when it is guessing. You have replaced an obvious risk with an invisible one.
When a price changes, the sheet changes the same day. Treat it like the till.
One sheet or several
Start with one. Split it when it goes past roughly two pages, or when two tasks need different material.
A useful split for a service business: a customer sheet (prices, hours, boundaries, voice) for anything a customer will read, and a supplier and internal sheet (cost prices, margins, which supplier is unreliable) for quoting and planning. This is not only about length. It stops your cost prices travelling into a conversation whose output goes to a customer, which is a mistake that happens more often than you would expect.
Testing whether it is finished
A sheet feels complete to the person who wrote it, because that person knows what was left out.
So test it against reality. Take the last twenty enquiries you actually received. For each one, ask: is everything needed to answer this on the page? Score honestly. Most first drafts answer about twelve.
The eight failures are your second draft, and they are almost never the things you expected. They are the parking situation, the fact that you cannot do Thursdays this month, the payment method half your customers use, whether you can split an order across two addresses.
Run this test again after a month of real use. By then you will have a list of gaps the model found for you, which brings us to the next lesson.
Every lesson here is open. Your progress is recorded once you pass the AI at Work exam.
Check your understanding
A shop’s facts sheet was written in March and prices rose in July, but the sheet was not updated. Why is this worse than having no facts sheet at all?
Pick the one you would defend. Your answer stays private.
Stuck on something?Ask Yetunde, your AI tutor