2 min read Build Together

Part 2: Auto-drafting customer support emails

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👋 Welcome to New Vintage, a weekly taste of tech for wine professionals to level up with no-code and AI tools.

tl;dr this video walkthrough shows you how the template materials provided use AI to auto-draft responses to your customer support emails, directly in Gmail. No email is sent to your customers, but a drafted response automatically shows up in a given thread.

WELCOME BACK to part 2 of a build together series where we are on a mission to automate your support emails.

The goal here is not to create robotic, canned emails to your customers, but rather to scale a great customer experience through thoughtful system design. My hope is that you take the foundation we build here, and improve it for your business.

Last week, we made a basic email labeler in gmail, where we leveraged a smidge of AI to categorize our inbound emails so we might triage accordingly.

Today, we're going to add one more step in our flow to auto-draft email responses. If done correctly, it will feel like a bit of magic.

You do not have to have built last week's setup to succeed in this step.

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Getting started

No prior knowledge of any of the tools is required, but you may have to wade into unfamiliar waters. Don't worry, I got you!

You'll need:

  • The email account for the inbox you want to monitor
    • I use Gmail in the example
  • (NEW) A n8n account
    • Note: at the time of writing this, make.com didn't have a no-code way for you to draft a reply to the same thread, but n8n does
  • An OpenAI (or other LLM of choice) API Key
  • (Optional) a spreadsheet, I use Airtable

Resources/templates:

email_classifier_L2
upload this to n8n if you want to copy my setup
email_classifier_L2.json
67 KB
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This is where you import the setup in n8n to get the exact nodes:

where to import the json file in n8n

A screenshot of my table schema in Airtable:

What this build will do:

  • read inbound emails
  • label them in Gmail by the most likely category (sales, support, events, other)
  • auto draft email responses directly in Gmail
  • it will not, by default, send the email (but you could change this)
  • set you up for future enhancements like:
    • referencing company policy documents automatically in drafted responses
    • adjusting the tone of voice/style of writing

Video walkthrough

Next week, we'll add documents so your drafted responses can be based on your policies or examples.

Hope this was helpful, leave a note in the comments 👇🏼

Cheers,

Stephen

Stephen Mok

Stephen Mok